Detail from the cover of ‘Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era’

By Justin Hyatt
BUDAPEST/BARCELONA, Nov 22 2014 (IPS)

For anyone who recently attended the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth in Leipzig, Germany, listening in on conference talk, surrounded by the ecologically savvy, one quickly noticed that no one was singing the praises of sustainable development.

Nonetheless, development per se and all that this entails did take centre stage, as a crowd of three thousand participants and speakers debated ongoing trends in the fields of environment, politics, economics and social justice.

Given that it may not be immediately clear why a rallying cry anchored to ecological principles would call for the demise of sustainable development – which in generic terms could be described as the environmentalist programme dating back several decades – it seems that a clarification or two would be in order.

As is the case with social movements, they evolve and go through periods of transformation like anything else does. When the term sustainable development came into use in the 1970s and 1980s, it did support the assumption that general environmental principles and minimum ecological limits should be respected when going about the everyday business of development.From the vantage point of economic realism, development is inextricably connected to economic growth. However, degrowthers carry the deeply-held belief that economic growth simply does not deliver what it promises: increased human welfare

The term sustainable development rapidly gained wide-scale acceptance, with the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development just one of the many (inter)governmental or top-down bodies that have set up in the past three decades to include environmental goals in planning and policy.

However, according to Federico Demaria, author and member of Research & Degrowth in Barcelona, the idea of sustainable development is based on a false consensus. Once this term and its underlying situations are properly deconstructed, Demaria tells IPS, “we discover that sustainable development is still all about development. And that is where the problem lies.”

Development is indeed a dirty word in degrowth circles. From the vantage point of economic realism, development is inextricably connected to economic growth. However, degrowthers carry the deeply-held belief that economic growth simply does not deliver what it promises: increased human welfare.

“Thus we find ourselves at a place where we need to readdress the flaws of sustainable development with a fresh perspective,” says Demaria.

It is with the hopes to do just that in a clear and powerful way that Demaria, along with Giorgos Kallis and Giacomo D’Alisa, have produced the new book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, which has just been released by Routledge.

This volume includes 50 entries that all touch on specific aspects of degrowth and go a long way towards elucidating the distinguishing factors of degrowth, as well as properly defining concepts ranging from conviviality to bioeconomics, societal metabolism and many others.

The historical development of the degrowth movement is also spelled out. Thus we learn that in the 1970s, at the time of the first phase of the degrowth debate, when The Limits to Growth by Dennis and Donella Meadows and others was published, resource limits was the talk of the town. Yet now, in what can be called the second stage, criticism of the hegemonic idea of sustainable development has come to the forefront.

It was Serge Latouche, an economic anthropologist, who defined sustainable development as an oxymoron in A bas le développement durable! Vive la décroissance conviviale!  (‘Down with sustainable development! Long live convivial degrowth!’) at a conference in Paris in 2002, affiliated with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and concerned with the issues of development.

Latouche and others in the French-speaking world began to give shape to the French movement, which called itself décroissance and eventually spread to other countries, entering Italy as decrescita and Spain as decrecimiento. Eventually, by 2010, degrowth emerged as the English-language term, well suited for universal applicability.

For many of the attendees of the degrowth conference in Leipzig, the set of vocabulary of the degrowth movement and even the very name degrowth begged to be dealt with carefully. There were a few proposals to switch to a name carrying positive connotations, instead of defining a movement based on opposition to something – growth in this case.

But Latouche and Demaria both argue that the word degrowth most concisely defines one chief objective of the movement – the abolition of economic growth as a social objective. Referred to as a missile word, it is disturbing for some, exactly because it intends to be provocative; as such, this has borne fruit.

There are certainly positive concepts to highlight in the degrowth movement. These include voluntary simplicity, conviviality and economy of care. Yet none of these terms are broad enough to be inclusive and representative of the breadth of ideas that make up the entirety of degrowth.

Perhaps Francois Schneider, another of the degrowth pioneers, put it best when he defined degrowth as: “equitable downscaling of production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materials.”

The goal in all of this, according to the authors of the new book, is not simply to have a society that can manage with less, but to have different arrangements and a different quality. That is where the idea of societal metabolism (that is, energy and materials within the economy) comes into place, because it explains how a degrowth society will have different activities, rearranged forms or uses of energy, and significantly different allocations of time between paid and non-paid work.

Taking social relations as well as the time-work relationship a step further, the theory of dépense, also described in the new book, comes in handy. Dépense signifies the collective consumption of ‘surplus’ in a society.

Nowadays, surplus time and energy is often re-invested in new production or used in an individualistic manner. This follows the dictum of capitalism whereby there should not be too many wasteful expenses; at the most individuals can employ their own all-too-brief methods to unwind from stressful life in the rat race.

Yet degrowth advocates point to the habits of older civilisations where surplus was dedicated to non-utilitarian purposes, be they festivals or celebrations. Degrowthers prefer to see an application of dépense to community-based uses that place conviviality and happiness-inducing activities above economic factors.

While no one can predict when and how the degrowth transition will take place, Demaria stresses that examples of this transition are already here. “Look no further than the transition town movement in the United Kingdom or Buen Vivir in South America,” says Demaria.

Demaria and others also hope that one specific effect of the Leipzig conference, as well as the brand new volume on degrowth, will be to re-politicise environmentalism. Sustainable development de-politicises real political oppositions and underlying dissonance, contributing to the false imaginary of decoupling: perpetuating development without harming the environment.

“Once we decide that we are not afraid to talk about the full implications of development, be they economic, social or political,” says Demaria, “then we begin to see that it is actually utopian to think that our societies can be based on economic growth for ever. Degrowth, by contrast, really offers the most common sense of all.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Families demonstrating to demand respect for their right to a roof over their heads, before the authorities evicted 13 families, including a dozen children, from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat in the southern Spanish city of Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

“I don’t want them to grow up with the notion that they’re poor,” says Catalina González, referring to her two young sons. The family has been living in an apartment rent-free since December in exchange for fixing it up, in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

Six months ago González, 40, and her two sons, Manuel and Leónidas, 4 and 5, were evicted by the local authorities from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat – an old apartment building with a common courtyard that had been occupied by 13 families who couldn’t afford to pay rent. The evicted families included a dozen children.

Since then, she told IPS, her sons “don’t like the police because they think they stole their house.”

Spain has the second-highest child poverty rate in the European Union, following Romania, according to the report “The European Crisis and its Human Cost – A Call for Fair Alternatives and Solutions” released Mar. 27 in Athens by Caritas Europa.

Bulgaria is in third place and Greece in fourth, according to the Roman Catholic relief, development and social service organisation.

The austerity measures imposed in Europe, aggravated by the foreign debt, “have failed to solve problems and create growth,” said Caritas Europa’s Secretary General Jorge Nuño at the launch of the report.

“We’re doing ok. The kids are already pre-enrolled in school for the next school year,” said González, a native of Barcelona, who left the father of her sons in Italy when she discovered that “he mistreated them.”

She started over from scratch in Málaga, with no family, job or income, meeting basic needs thanks to the solidarity of social organisations and mutual support networks.

According to a report published this year by the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, in 2012 more than 2.5 million children in Spain lived in families below the poverty line – 30 percent of all children.

UNICEF reported that 19 percent of children in Spain lived in households with annual incomes of less than 15,000 dollars.

“Child poverty is a reality in Spain, although politicians want to gloss over it and they don’t like us to talk about it because it’s associated with Third World countries,” the founder and president of the NGO Mensajeros de la Paz (Messengers of Peace), Catholic priest Ángel García, told IPS.

Spain’s finance minister Cristóbal Montoro said on Mar. 28 that the information released by Caritas Europa “does not fully reflect reality” because it is based solely on “statistical measurements.”

But in Málaga “there are more and more mothers lining up to get food,” Ángel Meléndez, the president of Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche, told IPS.

Every day, his organisation provides 500 breakfasts, 1,600 lunches and 600 dinners to the poor.

For months, González and her sons have been taking their meals at the “Er Banco Güeno”, a community-run soup kitchen in the low-income Málaga neighbourhood of Palma-Palmilla, which operates out of a closed-down bank branch.

According to Father Ángel, child poverty “isn’t just about not being able to afford food, but also about not being able to buy school books or not buying new clothes in the last two years.”

“It’s about unequal opportunity among children,” he said.

The crisis in Spain is still severe. The country’s unemployment rate is the highest in the EU: 25.6 percent in February, after Greece’s 27.5 percent.

In 2013, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy approved a National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2013-2016, which includes the aim of reducing child poverty.

Caritas Europa reports that at least one and a half million households in Spain are suffering from severe social inclusion – 70 percent more than in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis broke out.

“Entire families end up on the street because they can’t afford to pay rent,” Rosa Martínez, the director of the Centro de Acogida Municipal, told IPS during a visit to the municipal shelter. “More people are asking for food. They’re even asking for diapers for newborns because they are in such a difficult situation.”

Of the nearly 26 percent of the economically active population out of jobs, half are young people, according to the National Statistics Institute, while the gap between rich and poor is growing.

As of late March, 4.8 million people were unemployed, according to official statistics. The figures also show that the proportion of jobless people with no source of income whatsoever has grown to four out of 10.

Social discontent has been fuelled by austerity measures that have entailed cutbacks in health, education and social protection.

A report on the Housing Emergency in the Spanish State, by the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and the DESC Observatory, estimates that 70 percent of the families who have been, or are about to be, evicted include at least one minor.

“The right to equal opportunities is dead letter if children are ending up on the street,” José Cosín, a lawyer and activist with PAH Málaga, told IPS.

Cosín denounced the vulnerable situation of the children who were evicted along with their families from the Buenaventura corrala on Oct. 3, 2013.

Fifteen of the people who were evicted filed a lawsuit demanding respect of the children’s basic rights, as outlined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into effect in 1990.

The Convention establishes that states parties “shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.”

The number of families in Spain with no source of income at all grew from 300,000 in mid-2007 to nearly 700,000 by late 2013, according to the report Precariedad y Cohesión Social; Análisis y Perspectivas 2014 (Precariousness and Social Cohesion; Analysis and Perspectives 2014), by Cáritas Española and the Fundación Foessa.

And 27 percent of households in Spain are supported by pensioners. Grown-up sons and daughters are moving back into their parents’ homes with their families, or retired grandparents are helping support their children and grandchildren, with their often meagre pensions.

“When times get rough, the social fabric is strengthened,” said González. She stressed the solidarity of different groups in Málaga who for three months helped her clean up and repair the apartment she is living in now, which is on the tenth floor of a building with no elevator, and was full of garbage and had no door, window panes or piped water.

González complained that government social services are underfunded and inefficient, and said she receives no assistance from them.

Like all young children, her sons ask her for things. But she explains to them that it is more important to spend eight euros on food than on two plastic fishes. It took her several weeks to save up money to buy the toys. Last Christmas she took them to a movie for the first time.

Over 20 years, disaster losses in developing nations have amounted to 862 billion dollars (a considerable under-estimate). During this period the international community has spent just 13.5 billion dollars on disaster risk reduction (DRR), equivalent to 40 cents of every 100 dollars of development aid – this has to change.

The report to be launched Friday by the Overseas Development Institute and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery at the World Bank examines the record of the international community to date, investigating the priorities in financing of DRR, and asking questions about both the equity and adequacy of past efforts. Beyond this it points to the future of a more rational, targeted investment in risk reduction.

This is a key moment, with so many policy debates converging on 2015 representing a unique opportunity to ensure that DRR becomes a truly fundamental component of development and poverty reduction. The international financing of DRR, representing the international community’s support to national governments in their efforts to protect development gains from disasters, is coming under increasing scrutiny.

The evidence of the 20-year trends in international DRR financing is worrying:

• Financing has been highly volatile; only in the past few years has there been relative stability.
• Although 13.5 billion dollars of DRR financing has been made available, it is a fraction of overall aid.
• There is a high concentration of funding in a relatively small number of middle-income countries. The top 10 recipients received nearly eight billion dollars, the remaining 144 just 5.6 billion combined.
• Many high-risk countries have received negligible levels of financing for DRR compared with emergency response; 17 of the top 20 recipients of response funding received less than four percent of their disaster-related aid as DRR.

In addition, the priorities of international financing are, on the whole, not matched to either the needs or capacity of recipient countries:

• There is some correlation between mortality risk levels and volumes of financing, but only at the high-risk level.
• Per capita financing reveals significant inequity. Ecuador, the second highest recipient per capita, received 19 times more than Afghanistan, 100 times more than Costa Rica and 600 times more than the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
• Where the economy is at risk, volumes of financing tend to be high; where predominantly populations are at risk, volumes are often low.
• Financing in drought-affected countries is very weak. Niger, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi have seen 105 million people affected by drought, but their combined DRR financing has been 116.5 million dollars, the same as Honduras alone.
• Financing does not take into account national capacity and finances. Twelve of a group of 23 low-income countries each received less than 10 million dollars for DRR over 20 years. These same countries received 5.6 billion dollars in disaster response, equivalent to 160,000 dollars for every dollar of DRR.

There are positive areas to build upon, including relatively stable financing in the past few years; less financing of heavy infrastructure; a move away from richer middle-income countries; and increasing DRR financing from climate adaptation.

There should, however, be considerable caution given the pressures on traditional funding sources, and sustained concern for the high numbers of low-income, sub-Saharan African countries, often severely affected by drought, that have seen minimal international DRR financing.

The evidence drawn together in this report strongly suggests that the international community must take stock of the way it provides support to national governments. Questions need to be asked about the role of international financing, the funding architecture and how funds from other sources can be brought to bear. Above all else, there is a need to move towards gauging the effectiveness of what has been spent.

The future is not just about more money from donor governments, but also about better financing – more integrated and suitably coordinated, and certainly better targeted. This demands, above all else, that the business case for investing in DRR becomes clearer and stronger – and this is one of the key tasks leading up to and beyond 2015.

Jan Gerald Kellett is Senior Research Advisor on Climate and Environment at the Overseas Development Institute.

Within days of the inauguration of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president, both Tehran and Washington appear to be sending positive signals to each other.

Iran’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is President Rouhani’s pick as his foreign minister. Credit: Tabarez2/cc by 2.0

The latest came Monday in a flurry of reports from Iran that its former ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is Rouhani’s pick as his foreign minister.

“If true, this is a pretty big signal,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Washington think tank.

“Zarif is more pragmatic than ideological, and if Rouhani intends to improve Iran’s relations with the rest of the world and find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis, then he’s a logical choice,” Nader told IPS.

“He really knows the American scene and American politics,” added Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, where he became well-acquainted with Zarif during the latter’s five-year tenure at the U.N. (2002-2007).

“His English is absolutely perfect. He’s extraordinarily smart and highly respected in the United States by the people who dealt with him, both in New York and Washington.”

The reports of Zarif’s impending appointment followed a New York Times report Friday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has quietly communicated Rouhani’s interest in quickly engaging in direct talks with the U.S. after his inauguration.

They also followed the Barack Obama administration’s announcement late last week that it was easing restrictions on the sale of medical supplies and agricultural products, as well as the provision of humanitarian aid for Iran, in what was taken by many observers here as a goodwill gesture in advance of Rouhani’s formal inauguration Aug. 3-4.

In addition, administration officials have become somewhat more outspoken – albeit on background – over the past two weeks in opposing new anti-Iran sanctions legislation that may reach the floor of the Republican-led House of Representative as early as Wednesday.

The administration and its allies in Congress are worried that new sanctions would only strengthen hardliners in Tehran and undermine prospects for progress in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) that are thought likely to resume in September.

The pending bill, which has been strongly pushed by the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the vanguard of the Israel lobby here, seeks to impose a de facto ban on Iran’s oil exports, cut off any trade involving the euro, and target Tehran’s shipping and automobile sectors.

It would also curtail Obama’s ability to waive sanctions on third countries and their companies that continue to do business with Iran.

The push to get the bill through the House before Rouhani’s inauguration and before the August Congressional recess followed an appeal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a widely viewed U.S. public-affairs television programme two weeks ago to increase pressure, including “credible” threats of military action, on Iran to abandon its nuclear programme. Netanyahu called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

While the measure may indeed pass the House this week, it is likely to do so by a less lopsided margin than had been anticipated before Netanyahu’s bellicose appearance, however.

Five days after Netanyahu’s appearance, 131 House members, including 17 Republicans, signed a letter urging Obama to “reinvigorate(e) U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement” in light of the “potential opportunity” presented by the election of Rouhani, who stressed the importance of easing tensions with Iran’s neighbours and the West during and after the campaign.

The letter also suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax bilateral and multilateral sanctions against Iran in exchange for “significant and verifiable concessions” at the negotiating table and implicitly warned against adding new sanctions at such a sensitive moment.

Some of the signers are now calling on their colleagues to delay the vote or at least amend the bill in order to expand, rather than restrict, Obama’s authority to waive sanctions if it should eventually pass.

While AIPAC took no public position on the letter, it quietly discouraged inquiring House members from signing it, according to knowledgeable sources. Interestingly, Rouhani himself welcomed the letter on his twitter account, tweeting: “131 Congressmen have signed a letter calling on President Obama to give peace a chance with Iran’s new President.”

A similar letter authored by California Democrat and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein is reportedly now circulating in the Democrat-led upper chamber, which, in any event, is considered unlikely to act on any new sanctions legislation until autumn at the earliest, if not after the new year, according to Senate aides.

Meanwhile, a number of European diplomats who dealt with Rouhani in the early 2000s when he was in charge of Iran’s nuclear portfolio have stressed that his presidency offers a major opportunity for a breakthrough on that front.

In an op-ed published by the International Herald Tribune late last week, former French Ambassador to Iran, Francois Nicoullaud (2001-2006), wrote that Rouhani played the central role not only in reaching an agreement with the EU-3 (France, Britain and Germany) that resulted in Tehran’s suspending its uranium enrichment programme, but also in terminating an alleged secret weaponisation programme run by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).

Zarif’s appointment would be considered consistent with the growing conviction here that Rouhani is someone with whom Washington can indeed do business, not just on the nuclear file, but also with respect to key regional issues, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

He made powerful acquaintances, including then-senators Feinstein, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, during his U.N. tenure, although his contacts with U.S. diplomats date back all the way to the 1980s when he helped negotiate the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

“Zarif is a tough advocate but he’s also pragmatic, not dogmatic,” now Vice President Biden told the Washington Post when he was recalled to Tehran in 2007. “He can play an important role in helping to resolve our significant differences with Iran peacefully.”

Citing his talks with Zarif, now-Pentagon chief Hagel called for “direct engagement” between Washington and Tehran.

Amb. James Dobbins, who was recently appointed as Obama’s chief aide on Afghanistan and Pakistan, has spoken highly of Zarif’s role in brokering the Bonn accord that followed the Taliban’s ouster from power in Afghanistan.

Zarif also reportedly played a key role in drafting a 2003 proposal for a “grand bargain” between Iran and the U.S. covering all outstanding issues between the two countries that was secretly conveyed to Washington via the Swiss ambassador in Tehran – only to be ignored by a triumphalist George W. Bush administration emboldened by its speedy, albeit ultimately and illusory, conquest of neighbouring Iraq.

“When he came to New York, he was out to build bridges, and he was quite successful at it,” Sick said. “He never deviated from the official position of the Islamic Republic, but he was capable of presenting it in a non-confrontational and imaginative way so that people could understand and sympathise with what Iran was saying and doing.”

If he is indeed nominated, he must still be approved by the Parliament, where he could face strong opposition from hard-liners due to his close association with former President Mohammad Khatami, according to experts here. As with other major foreign-policy decisions, his fate could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

“Zarif is closely associated with Khatami, and the ultra-conservatives … hate Khatami. Looking at Rouhani’s reported list of cabinet ministers, Zarif can be considered to be the candidate most closely aligned with the reformists. He is probably one of the best candidates to deal with the West, but perhaps the candidate most susceptible to political intrigue,” Nader said.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Over 700 people were arrested in a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011. Credit: Paul Stein/CC by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Stories of struggle can be found all over the world, from a law classroom in Oklahoma and the brutal borderlands between the United States and Mexico to a Bedouin village in Jordan and wedding parties in Morocco, as the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Festival is showcasing.

Some films cover subjects that have been widely reported, such as the Occupy movement and Anita Hill’s sexual harassment case against Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, but they nevertheless delve beneath the surface, bringing fresh perspectives to well-known events.

In New York, the festival runs through the end of the week in two Manhattan cinemas. The festival revolves around themes such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, disability rights and migration. It has a separate category this year for U.S. human rights issues."The audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests."
-- John Biaggi

“We don’t want anyone to ever think that we’re giving our country a pass,” John Biaggi, director of the festival, told IPS.

“99 Percent – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film” (Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites, Lucian Read, Nina Krstic, 2012), which presents the story of the Occupy movement, is part of this theme and has been of particular interest to moviegoers, Biaggi said.

“People have reacted very strongly to [the] film in a positive way…the audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests,” he said.

Remembering Occupy

Kindled by the Arab Spring and a summer of European unrest, the Occupy movement began in downtown New York City on Sep. 17, 2011 as Americans felt the rush of revolution take hold in Zuccotti Park.

Filmmakers Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites told IPS that the film was set up as an experiment with 100 collaborators.

“We went to Zuccotti Park and saw how everyone congregated; [there was] a pastiche quality, a collage-like element, with people talking about a patchwork of issues,” Ewell said.

The filmmakers issued press releases and created a web site asking for collaborators on their project, with a large response. While some people who signed up were inexperienced, Ewell and Aites ensured that an experienced filmmaker always led shoots.

It wasn’t a “free-for-all”, Ewell said; rather, it was a highly coordinated and organised process between coasts.

“A lot of people just wanted to go and film a rally or a march and that was fine,” Ewell said. The filmmakers wanted collaborators to be able to choose the extent of their contributions.

Ewell and Aites became interested in the Occupy movement on Oct. 1, 2011, the day 740 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. They noticed that the mainstream media wasn’t covering the event at all.

“I was so disturbed by that…I grabbed my camera and went down,” Ewell said. After the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, the media switched from a blackout to a circus, Aites added.

“Now the media writes history,” Ewell said.

The primary goal of “99 Percent”, the filmmakers said, was to present an accurate history of what really happened with Occupy, especially for those who didn’t have access to footage of the movement, whether on television or the Internet, at the time protests and demonstrations were taking place.

Invisible tales of hardship

South of the U.S. border, “The Undocumented” (Marco Williams, 2013) examined the lives of those working on the border, watching hawk-eyed for migrants and tracking the patterns of soles in the sand.

Deaths of border-crossing migrants have increased since the 1990s, with hundreds of bodies found in the scorching Arizona desert every year.

As the immigration reform debate continues in the U.S. senate, “The Undocumented” shows the lengths some migrants will go to achieve their dream of coming to America, even to the extent of ultimately losing their lives.

“Fatal Assistance” (Raoul Peck, 2012) revealed the complications of humanitarian aid following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, uncovering the destructive decisions made by foreign governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Haiti received 5 billion dollars of aid money in 18 months, but the funds were not allocated rationally, Peck, former minister of culture in Haiti, argued. Two years after the devastation, by which time many outside Haiti cease to remember the earthquake, the rebuilding continues.

On the other side of the world, “Camp 14 – Total Control Zone” (Mark Wiese, 2012) followed a former North Korean labour camp inmate, Shin Don-Hyuk, as he adjusts to a new and normal life in South Korea.

Two hundred thousand people live in North Korean camps. Shin was born in one, his first memory of a public execution he watched with his mother.

Shin’s story of escape, which he now travels the world to tell, seem almost unbelievable, but footage smuggled out of North Korea by activists of a violent interrogation show that the horror is indeed real.

“Energising people who come and see the films, to get involved and to take action, that’s really what the festival is about,” Biaggi said.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs until Jun. 23. Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the IFC Centre, the festival has included a number of New York premieres.

Human Rights Watch recently established a disability rights division, which accompanies the festival’s dedication to screening films that focus on the issue of disability. The group estimates that there are around 1 billion disabled people across the world.

More films showing this week include “The Act of Killing”, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, which shows a group of Indonesian former killers re-enacting their crimes in by mirroring films they enjoy, and “Camera/Woman”, about a divorced Moroccan woman who films wedding parties in Casablanca.

A Bangladeshi farmer shows off vegetables grown on his small, sustainable “dyke” garden. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

The current growth model is not sustainable. Neither the green economy nor alternative sources of energy can prevent global warming. Solutions will come from concerted actions at the local and national levels, from the adoption of instruments and practices borrowed from other disciplines like peacebuilding, and from the move to a “no-waste economy”, according to experts here.

In its milestone report, “The Limits to Growth”, published in 1972, the Club of Rome warned that the human ecological footprint had grown dangerously quickly from 1900 to 1972. Shortly thereafter, the warning proved to be prophetic: by 1986 the human ecological footprint had overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth. At current production and consumption levels, we need 1.5 planets to survive; if everyone lived like a U.S. citizen, we would need five planets.

Land, water and biodiversity continue to decline. Global CO2 emissions are on the rise. The oceans are warming and the sea level is rising continuously. Forest cover has decreased by 300 million hectares since 1990.

In his new book, “The Crisis of Global Sustainability”, presented in Geneva on Mar. 15, Tapio Kanninen, co-director of a project on sustainable global governance at the City University of New York and member of the Club of Rome, warms that we cannot continue with the current model of economic growth whilst limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Technology cannot help us – it would be environmentally damaging and too costly, he says. We cannot move to alternative sources of energy – the present alternatives like solar, nuclear and wind contribute relatively little of global energy needs and they are unlikely to replace fossil fuel completely. In short: humanity has reached a stalemate.

“Many U.N. summits after the (1987) Brundtland Commission have avoided concrete action,” Kanninen said at the book launch Friday.

The recent Rio+20 Earth Summit held in Brazil this past June is just one example of the limitations of these international gatherings. Though thousands of participants had hoped the conference would generate concrete solutions and commitments to reducing global warning, the concluding document made no mention of the 30-billion-dollar fund need to transition to a green economy, nor did it outline a blueprint for sustainable development post 2015.

“Institutions and policies have been weak,” Kanninen said. “The concept of sustainable development has not been able to compete with the neoliberal economic paradigm, the Washington consensus and the paradigm of globalisation. These have advocated fiscal and monetary soundness and economic growth rather than the health of the ecosystem. And developed countries have not met their commitments to developing ones.”

Most of these summits draw very high-level attendance, but in the end industrialised countries’ national interests dominate the bargaining universe. The global North wants to safeguard its neoliberal economic targets, while the South continues to defend its development goals.

“Unless societies build alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, drought, famine, water scarcity, rising sea level, loss of island nations and increasing ocean acidification.”

Kanninen advocates for a second review conference of the U.N. charter and a complete paradigm shift.

“It is impossible to know exactly how the latter is going to play out because it will be so big,” he admitted to IPS. “We need joint action (involving) all sectors of society.”

Kanninen advocates abandoning the old approach of viewing sustainable development as a battlefield and adopting instead instruments from peace-building processes.

Yves Lador, consultant and representative of the U.S.-based Earthjustice at the U.N. in Geneva, told IPS on the sidelines of the book launch that this was an interesting approach.

“Particularly (with regards) to climate change, we need some trust building measures inspired by the disarmament agreements”, through which governments allow outsiders to monitor their progress. He added that cross verification between different independent monitors could bolster the exercise.

“This would be very useful because we don’t know the reality of various countries’ emissions. China, for example, does not make this data readily available. India has problems in data collection, but welcomes outside advice on how to share this data with the public.

“It is an information and trust issue,” Lador said. “At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, the U.S. put forward the idea of cross-checking greenhouse gas emissions, but China refused.”

He cited growing awareness of the link between climate change and human rights as a salient example of the right to information – namely, the right of the public to know the extent and impacts of climate change and to participate in decision-making.

Alexander Likhotal, president of the Green Cross International, has a different paradigm shift in mind. “All the euphemisms like green economy will not help,” he told IPS. “We need a circular economy to decouple economic growth from the use of energy and materials.”

A circular economy is, by definition, a restorative economy: products should be designed for longer use and materials reused and recycled, which would increase the demand for maintenance and repairs. The concept has been around since the 1970s but it has gained momentum again due to the activities of the U.S.-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation and to “Bankrupting Nature”, a recent report authored by Ander Wijkman and Johan Rockström, co-president of the Club of Rome.

The circular economy “is creating a new model for business”, Likhotal continued. “Rolls Royce, for example, in addition to providing luxury cars, constructs engines and turbines for aircrafts. But they have stopped selling the engines to air companies – instead, they lease them. They benefit not from the bulk sales of the engines but from maintenance and competitiveness of the services, and are dramatically reducing their expenses.”

He believes an increase in services like leasing would compensate for the loss of jobs resulting from the decrease in production. Other major companies like Caterpillar have stopped selling huge trucks, and have begun to lease them.

“It is a win-win situation that is gaining more ground,” he stressed. “The change is coming…but it will not come without legislation and taxation incentives – political systems should provide some motivation for more openness and competiveness in terms of services provision.”