Guides
Week reflections on a divided world Images: Bill Gunyon/Peter Armstrong
week ending November 21st No more World Food Summits please I try my best in these articles to conjure up something original to say about longstanding world poverty issues. An unusual fact or juxtaposition, however modest in scope, might just expose a chink in the armour of global injustice.
The failure of last week’s World Summit on Food Security to commit to a timescale for the eradication of hunger was a morally delinquent denial of human rights. It also threatens to torpedo areas of human development which enjoy more enlightened commitments to progress. At the first of these Food Summits back in 1974, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, declared that global hunger would be eradicated by 1984. By 1996, far from fading to zero, the hunger figure had nearly doubled from 435 million to 830 million people. The second Summit, held in that year, moved the goalposts and adopted a more pragmatic target of halving the 1996 figure by 2015. Just four years later, the Millennium Declaration accelerated further in reverse gear by realigning the target to the percentage of the population experiencing hunger, as opposed to the absolute number. This spineless chronology of diminishing intent leads inexorably to its nadir in 2009. Firstly, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization announces that hunger has crossed the one billion threshold. Secondly, the so-called Summit on Food Security throws out a draft text committing leaders to eradicate hunger by 2025 at an estimated cost of $44 billion pa. Meanwhile, agricultural subsidies paid to farmers in rich OECD countries amount to $365 billion pa. And the world banking system has been rescued at a capital cost of over $2,500 billion, according to the IMF.
Encouraging progress has also been made towards the goal to provide universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS. Rising hunger will be a setback because a regime of anti-retroviral medicine is especially difficult to sustain for patients whose diet is poor. How can we expect India and other developing countries to adjust the trajectory of their carbon dioxide emissions before 2020 without first helping them to eliminate hunger? All the advice about adaptation to a changing climate for poor farmers stresses the urgency of achieving existing food security and livelihood goals as a first line of defence. I know that many people are cynical about poverty reduction targets because so often the method of calculation appears to deny the possibility of success. But hunger is different. The FAO defines an absolute calorie benchmark and the world already grows enough food to provide this average for everyone. It boils down to the old marketing mantra of providing what people want, in the right place at the right time at the right price. I understand that’s what they teach in all those great business schools. If only food security could be the compulsory first module of MBA courses, then we might be spared these dispiriting and wasteful world summits. ****** World Summit on Food Security A Call for Coherence and Responsibility (pdf file) by Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food OneWorld Guide updated this week: Food Security
****** week ending November 14th Climate and sanitation: partners in shame The connection between Winchester and the village of Dabena in the state of Chhattisgarh is not exactly self-evident. Central India is out of range of those feel-good twinning schemes so popular in Europe. We are instead united in shame, the shame of anti-social behaviour.
The fawning villagers who tag along on such occasions were so humiliated that almost overnight their insanitary habit of open defecation was abandoned. In development circles this event has become known as the Walk of Shame, symbolic of new ideas for community-led change in poor hygiene practices in India and beyond. Thankfully there are no defecation fields in Winchester, although some dog owners do their best. Our history of shame started in October 2007 when a WWF report pronounced the city’s residents to have Britain’s largest ecological footprint. The Stockholm Environment Institute, which contributed figures for WWF, continues to publish reports castigating Winchester’s households for their average annual carbon dioxide emissions of more than 25 tonnes. Our parallels with Dabena go much deeper than the language of headlines. We have both been frustrated that long-established ways of life are resistant to appeals for the common good. Those villagers were behaving irrationally in using the fields. Their backyards had been equipped with state-of-the-art pit latrines at government expense. This has been a problem in India for years; day-to-day hygiene behaviour won’t respond to the crude weapon of financial subsidy. The sarpanch managed to tap deeper forces of shame and peer pressure.
Nonetheless, as in Dabena, something of a transformation may be under way. From the low point of that WWF report, Winchester may be on the brink of applying for Transition Town status, the ultimate badge of approval for eco-friendly intent. This is largely thanks to the efforts of an unusually incisive pressure group, Winchester Action on Climate Change, founded in the same month as the WWF report was published. A condition of membership is registration of your carbon footprint and an action plan to reduce it. Progress is then published on the website (with permission). I imagine the approach has something in common with the shaming philosophy of Weightwatchers, the periodic disclosure being in tonnes rather than kilos. Certainly, I’d like to see the lady who admits to over 11 tonnes trying a little harder. I hope it works because environmentalists are greatly in need of good news stories. With the Copenhagen conference relegated to a staging post, we must look even more to individuals to take control of our futures. The problem with carbon dioxide is that it doesn’t smell and you can’t tread in it. Its harmful impact is found not in the back field but on the other side of the world. No wonder we’re struggling to get the message across. ****** Walk of Shame Triggers Toilet Consciousness from Unicef City among worst polluters in UK from Hampshire Chronicle Ecological Footprint of British City Residents (pdf file) from WWF, October 2007 Carbon Footprints for Individuals from Winchester Action on Climate Change OneWorld Guide for reference: Environmental Activism OneWorld Guide updated this week: Water and Sanitation
****** week ending November 7th Deforestation: to be or not to be? In 1987 I was terribly busy trying to be one of those self-important people who are too busy to be doing anything else. It’s no surprise that I disdained to see a new film billed as student humour, with the unpromising title Withnail and I. Last Sunday, a cult generation later, my oversight was remedied. I don't know why the film should resurface in Winchester at this particular moment, especially as the Everyman Cinema chain has a rather unkind pricing policy towards students.
Only the most diehard followers of the cult might glimpse any link between this idle speculation and my serious business of the week, the updating of our Tropical Forests Guide. It all lies in that final scene whose startling gear-change invites more serious interpretation of the film than it otherwise deserves. Having staggered across Regent’s Park in the pouring rain, increasingly deranged by swigs from Uncle Monty’s bottle of Margaux ’53, Withnail summons up his longest oration of the film in word perfect lines of Hamlet: ....indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy....why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
No wonder that this language resonated with my subject and mood. I see little hope for the protection of large mammals in the wild and fish stocks are on the brink. The capacity of technology to overwhelm the so-called lesser life forms and their habitats has simply outpaced our ability to manage it wisely. Nonetheless, in the nick of time a potential saviour for the tropical forests has emerged in the improbable guise of climate change. Since the IPCC 2007 Assessment estimated that deforestation contributes 17.4% of greenhouse gas emissions, the movement to save the rainforest has a new spring in its step. One dimension of our ecological mass suicide holds a knife over the other. Few argue with Lord Stern’s conclusion that protection of the forests is the most cost effective mitigation strategy on the table. Of all the principal sources of greenhouse gases, deforestation offers least harm from the optimum solution – to stop doing it outright and soon. Global targets of 25% reduction by 2015 are banded about and Brazil has offered 50% by 2020 on its vital Amazonian patch. The devil lies in the detail. The more I understand about proposals for REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation), the more I find it hard to believe that it can function on any scale in the short term. How can countries as massive, multi-ethnic and biologically diverse as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo be held accountable for payments to cease deforestation, this year, next year and indefinitely? Is there indeed a philosophical flaw in creating monetary value for not doing something? This is confusing territory and leads swiftly back to the introspective mood of the Prince of Denmark. Let’s refer instead to As You Like It, an ever-reliable source of cheer. When the characters assemble for the first time in the Forest of Arden, the Duke sums up its value... Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? … And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything. I would not change it. ****** OneWorld Guide updated this week: Tropical Forests
****** week ending October 31st What if there had been no banking crisis? I began these GuidesWeek articles just over a year ago, when our beloved banks were scaring the daylights out of those parts of the world that depend on their services.
My view has always been that the banking system should have been shut down at that point and rebooted under total government control rather than the phoney public-private partnership now in place. My first piece questioned the mantra of “doing whatever is necessary” – for whose benefit? Instead Gordon Brown seized the hour and “saved the world” with his recapitalisation strategy, a plan to throw so much public money at the banks that they could not fail.
Although politicians avoid the subject, state finances will take a generation to recover. Faced with chronic global insecurities over food, water and energy, plagued by climate change, governments have nothing in the kitty. Rich countries have mortgaged their exchequers for a turkey. I often wonder what would have happened if all those financial risk management systems and banking regulations had functioned properly. The industrialised world would approach 2010 bathed in solvency but, for the poorest countries, the consequences of long years of economic injustice and environmental abuse would be there just the same.... ...eventually, as successive crop failures, extreme weather events and forced migration take their increasing toll, world leaders pronounce that poor sovereign states are “too big to fail” and that we must do “whatever it takes” to bail them out. Analysts draw attention to “sub-prime” assets of small farms, prone to accepting loans beyond their means. And regulatory bodies responsible for stabilising the climate are exposed as useless. Successive attempts to revive these economies with aid and poverty reduction programmes fail. Then it’s discovered that the toxic agriculture assets are impossible to value. No one can agree on a price for adapting to climate change. The opportunity cost of saving tropical forests is disputed, indeed scientists don’t even know how to measure the carbon content of a forest. In desperation, the world turns to Gordon Brown, the only leader with a grasp of international development issues. They accept his decisive remedy to recapitalise the least developed countries, a Marshall Plan for world poverty. The funding is raised effortlessly in a global justice bond issue, skilfully brokered by Lehman Brothers.... Elements of this whimsy may increasingly haunt the debt-laden years that lie ahead. Even the most extravagant of NGO estimates for addressing the troubles of the developing world – food security, education, health, AIDS, climate adaptation, safe water, sanitation, electricity – would cost a fraction of all those bank rescues and recession-busting stimulus packages. That Gordon Brown missed his real chance to “save the world” has been a personal tragedy for him, and for the cause of sustainable development. ****** Whatever is necessary for the economy from GuidesWeek archive Latest Goldman Sachs profits swell billion-dollar bonus pool from the Guardian. Hungry get Hungrier as Funding for Food Aid Stutters from World Food Programme OneWorld Guide for reference: Global Poverty
****** GuidesWeek Archive from October 2008 |
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