UNEP NEWS RELEASE - 2008/31

World Heritage Push for Garden of Eden: Italy Backs Bid to List Iraqi Marshlands Following Completion Of UNEP Restoration Project.

KYOTO/NAIROBI, 5 September 2008–A plan to list as a World Heritage Site an
area known as the Fertile Crescent, and thought by some to be the location
of the Biblical “Garden of Eden”, was unveiled today by the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) in cooperation with the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The initiative, to be supported by funding from the Government of Italy,
aims to further the protection and conservation of a significant wetland of
global cultural, natural and environmental importance.

The Marshlands, spawning grounds for Gulf fisheries and home to species
like the Sacred Ibis, were almost totally drained and destroyed by the
former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1990s and early 21st
century.

Dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which feed the fabled
area, had also aggravated the decline. By 2002 the 9,000 square km of
permanent wetlands had dwindled to just 760 square km.

UNEP estimated then that these wetlands would be completely lost within
three to five years unless urgent action was taken.

The World Heritage management support plan, announced at the end of a
meeting in Kyoto, follows a four-year, $14 million UNEP project to restore
the ecological viability of the site, while bringing sustainable
livelihoods to the Marsh Arabs.

***

The Marsh Arabs, the 5,000 year-old heirs of the Babylonians and the
Sumerians, and their wetland home had been targeted by the former Iraqi
Government forcing an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 into exile or camps in
and outside Iraq.

With the collapse of the Saddam Hussein Government in mid-2003, local
residents began breaking the drainage embankments and opening the
floodgates to bring water back into the marshlands.,

The UNEP marshland management project, which commenced in 2004 with funding
from the UN Iraq Trust Fund, the Government of Japan and the Government of
Italy, has been working with the Iraqi Environment Ministry and local
communities to accelerate improvements.

These include environmentally-friendly methods that are providing safe
drinking water for up to 22,000 people, the planting of reed banks and beds
as natural pollution and sewage filters and the introduction of renewable
energies such as solar.

A Marshland Information Network has been established. Training in
satellite and field monitoring and wetland restoration and management has
also been part of project which today completed its final evaluation phase
at the Kyoto meeting.

During this meeting, the Iraqi Ministry of Environment also requested UNEP
to provide support for accession to multilateral environmental agreements
(MEAs) in order to take part in the international environmental challenges
but also opportunities facing the planet.

MEAs range from the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal
Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Convention of
Migratory Species and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Narmin Othman, the Iraqi Environment Minister who is in Japan for the
event, said: “I am very happy that we are now going to work towards making
the Marshlands a National Park and a globally important World Heritage
Site.”

“Because of what Saddam Hussein did, the marshlands were in danger of
completely disappearing as was the centuries-old culture of the Marsh
Arabs. It had become an ecological but also a human tragedy”, she said.

“Now we have 50 to 60 per cent of the marshlands back we can look forward
to further improvements and putting them on the map as Iraq’s first mixed,
natural and cultural World Heritage Site as befits an area of global
significance”, added Minister Othman.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director,
said: “I would like to thank the Governments of Japan and Italy for their
support and congratulate the Iraqi people on these extraordinary
achievements.”

“The work in the Iraqi marshlands may have been unique and challenging for
a whole variety of reasons. But the lessons we have learnt go beyond
Iraq’s border. They provide a blue print for the restoration for the many
other damaged, degraded and economically-important wetland ecosystems
across the world”, he added.

***

Mr. Steiner said he looked forward to working with the Iraqi Government and
cooperating with UNESCO on developing a comprehensive management plan en
route to securing a World Heritage Site listing and thanked the Government
of Italy for its invaluable support.

Chizuru Aoki of UNEP’s International Environmental Technology Centre (IETC)
in Japan, which has been coordinating the project, said today that the
Italian funds would be used to draw up and implement a sustainable
preservation and management plan.

This will include pilot projects on community-wide ecosystem management and
cultural preservation as well as capacity building, jointly with UNESCO and
the Iraqi authorities.

According to UNESCO, the earliest that Iraq could envisage a submission to
the World Heritage Committee might be 2010 which, if approved could see the
Marshlands of Mesopotamia listed as World Heritage in 2011.

“It is essential that we continue to work with the Iraqi partners, UNESCO,
as well as other relevant organizations to help Iraq move towards this
goal”, Ms. Aoki said.

***

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

The Iraqi Marshland Project:  http://marshlands.unep.or.jp/

UNEP’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch Iraq Reports:
 http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications…

Downloadable maps and images at www.unep.org?

For more information, please contact: Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and
Head of Media, +41-79-596-5737 or +254-733-632755, or
 nick.nuttall at unep.org”,

Yukio Yoshii, Senior Liaison Officer, UNEP International Environmental
Technology Centre, +81-6-915-4591, or  yukio.yoshii at unep.or.jp

Habib El-Habr, Director and Regional Representative, UNEP Regional Office
for West Asia, +973-178-12-777, or  habib.elhabr at unep.org.bh.

***********************************
Jim Sniffen
Programme Officer
UN Environment Programme
New York
tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210
 info at nyo.unep.org
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From the IPCC Meeting in Geneva:

Mr. Rajendra Pachauri, has been reelected by acclamation this morning for a second term.

Mr. Pachauri will meet the press on Thursday following the closure of the Plenary at 13.00, at the CICG in Geneva.

He will then introduce the new Bureau members and provide information on other major items concerning the future IPCC work program.

The Chairman will only be available for interviews on that occasion.

Please see Press release attached.

With best wishes,

Brenda Abrar-Milani
IPCC information and communication Office
World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
7 bis, avenue de la Paix
CH-1211 Geneva 2
Switzerland
Tel. +4122 730 8066
Email:  babrar at wmo.int
Web: www.ipcc.ch

————————————————-

PRESS RELEASE
Tuesday September 2, 2008.
The IPCC is happy to announce that its Chairman, Mr. Rajendra Pachauri, has been reelected by acclamation this morning for a second term.

Mr. Pachauri has been the head of the organization since 2002. Under his leadership, the IPCC released “Climate Change 2007”, its Fourth Assessment Report, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is holding its 29th Plenary session in Geneva until Thursday 4 September.

All other agenda items under discussion, including the election of the other Bureau members, are still in progress. The new team elected by all member countries will lead the IPCC through the preparation of the Fifth Assessment Report, which is expected to be released in 2014.

Mr. Pachauri will meet the press on Thursday following the closure of the Plenary at 13.00, at the CICG in Geneva. He will then introduce the new Bureau members and provide information on other major items concerning the future IPCC work program.

The Chairman will only be available for interviews on that occasion.
Contact :
Brenda Abrar-Milani :  babrar at wmo.int Tel: +33 614 81 73 98/ IPCC website : www.ipcc.ch

Impasse: Are We Nearing the End of the Corporate Globalization Era?
By Deborah James, AlterNet. Posted August 21, 2008.

The failure to expand the WTO shows that the ideology of “free trade” has lost its luster.

When the history of the seismic shifts occurring today in the global economy is written, the failure in July 2008 of corporate interests and some governments to expand the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Doha Round will stand as a watershed moment.

It was in this lakeside town where negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies, to which the majority of governments have said “no”, time and time again (in Seattle in 1999, Mexico in 2003, and Geneva in 2006). WTO Director General Pascal Lamy attempted a last-minute push to conclude a Doha deal by calling for an exclusive, invitation-only mini-Ministerial of around 30 of the WTO’s 153 members in Geneva last month, despite wide divergences in political positions within the areas of negotiation, and despite the fact the Bush administration has no authority to sign any potential deal.

And since it wasn’t enough of an abrogation of democratic process to exclude four-fifths of the WTO’s membership from the so-called “Green Room” negotiations, when talks failed to converge amongst those 30 countries, Lamy continued negotiations with a mere seven members, including almost all of the developed world, yet excluding all of Africa — in a round that proponents still shamelessly refer to as a “Development Round.” Many developing countries such as Bolivia and Kenya and even the host, Switzerland, raised significant process concerns about their exclusion from the meeting, but their concerns were dismissed by Lamy.

Were Africans allowed to participate in the secret discussions, they would have demanded resolution on issues such as the reform of U.S. cotton subsidies to 20,000 domestic producers, which encourage overproduction and erode the income of 10 million African cotton farmers in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, driving many of them out of business and reducing revenues key to health care and education budgets for the poor. Some observers have highlighted Africans’ strong stand on development issues when they were allowed at the table. Many have even argued that rich countries’ desire to avoid key African issues such as cotton is actually what led to the collapse, but this part of the story seems just too ugly to have been repeated in the U.S. press.

Recent coverage in the United States of the talks’ failure has focused on the negotiating positions of various countries, particularly blaming India and China. But when one delves into the underlying issues, it becomes clear that much more was at stake in the negotiations than “trade,” and that the collapse was due to forces far greater than individual countries’ positions — including issues surrounding the food, climate, and financial crises — as well as the lack of progress on development due to the failure of neoliberal policies to actually promote growth or reduce poverty. Given the changes in international political dynamics as well as the global agenda, the collapse in the current negotiations will have far-reaching impacts beyond just the WTO.

Food Sovereignty or Food Crisis:

Take agriculture, for example, the issue cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse. India, supported by the vast majority of developing countries, fought for the right to be allowed within the WTO to protect its farmers, food security, and rural development from the volatility of the commodity markets. Surges of subsidized imported products have so devastated local agricultural producers, who represent three-fifths of the workforce in a population of 1.1 billion people, that it is said that over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in recent years. However, U.S. negotiators wouldn’t allow for the protections, and demanded increased access to poor countries’ markets for its agribusiness exports, while refusing to reduce the cap on domestic subsidies below twice their current rate.

It is not a coincidence that the talks fell apart over issues related to agriculture, in a year where countries from Haiti to Pakistan and Mexico to Cameroon have seen riots break out over food prices. While commodity prices are fortunately on a slight decline, the food crisis is eroding allegiance to the free trade dogma in agriculture. Many developing countries that used to be able to take care of their own food needs are now heavily dependent on imports. Two-thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. Decades of IMF and World Bank-mandated structural adjustment policies, coupled with “free trade agreements” as well as WTO policies, have forced developing countries to reduce tariffs — which, combined with high levels of permitted subsidies in rich countries — has eviscerated the productive capacity of many developing countries. WTO policies have also contributed to the erosion of the family farm in the United States and other rich countries. Further WTO expansion would exacerbate, not solve the food crisis, no matter the claims of Lamy.

Another key factor at play in the negotiations in Geneva was the continued mobilization against the expansion of these failed policies by civil society worldwide. For example, farmers in India have been organizing massive protests over the last many years against the WTO. Their anger sharpened as they witnessed the harsh pressure their government was subjected to during the talks, including at least three personal calls from President Bush to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the negotiations.

Farmers from Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and other countries lobbied their representatives in Geneva while keeping civil society at home up to date about the state of play in the negotiations. They pressured their governments to resist the anti-development demands, and helped ensure the victory of the collapse.

Kicking Away the Ladder of Development:

A similar dynamic emerged in the other major pillar of the negotiations in Geneva, regarding tariffs on industrial goods. Tariffs are essentially taxes that corporations pay to governments for the privilege of selling their goods, and making a profit, in another country. Strategic use of tariffs has been a core strategy of any industrialization policy; governments increase tariffs to protect infant industries from foreign competition to promote domestic jobs and development, then lower tariffs when those industries are competitive, to save consumers money. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang illuminates, the U.S. had the world’s highest tariffs at the turn of the century, during our industrialization. Now, rich countries are essentially saying, “Do as I say, not as I did,” arguing that developing countries should reduce their tariffs, because rich countries now have lower tariffs and are richer. This amounts to the proverbial Kicking Away the Ladder of development (PDF).

In the WTO this plays out in the area of negotiations called “Non Agricultural Market Access,” or NAMA in WTO-speak. Both developed and developing countries have agreed to reduce tariffs, within the Doha mandate of Less Than Full Reciprocity. This means that developing countries are supposed to gain more “market access” to developed countries (and hence reduce their own tariffs by a lesser percentage) than vice versa. However, in the actual negotiations, rich countries demanded that developing countries slash their bound tariffs by an average of about 60 percent, while only offering to cut their own tariffs by half as much (about 28 percent.)

According to the International Trade Union Confederation, these tariff cuts would result in tens of thousands of lost jobs in newly-industrializing developing countries, in the midst of a crisis of poverty and lack of development progress in many countries. In addition, the Third World Network has pointed out that the cuts will also foreclose the possibilities for industrial development for many of the poorest countries. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that tariff losses (which provide for a significant portion of health and education budgets in many developing countries) would amount to nearly four times the small projected “gains” for developing countries from the Doha Round.

Fortunately, trade unionists from South Africa, India, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other countries have become increasingly vocal about their concerns, and traveled to Geneva to lobby their governments, raise their voices in the media, and ensure that workers at home were putting pressure on their capitals to defend their interests. While the issue of industrial tariff cuts was not reported as being the deal-breaker this time, it is clear that it will remain a primary objective of the rich countries in the negotiations.

WTO Expansion would Exacerbate, not Solve, Climate, Financial Crises:

Agriculture and jobs-and-development are not the only arenas in which it is becoming increasingly evident that the WTO is a contributor to, rather than a solution to, present global crises. The global climate crisis will also require new, innovative solutions. Unfortunately many of those ideas will clash with WTO prohibitions on regulatory policies that could, in some way, unintentionally restrict trade. We already know that shipping products tens of thousands of miles across the world so that corporations can take advantage of cheap labor in some countries, weak environmental standards in others, and developed consumer markets in yet a third, contributes significantly to global warming. Do we really want our ability to preserve life on our planet to be constrained by the WTO?

No issue has dominated headlines this year more than the global financial crisis, now widely agreed to have been facilitated by a lack of adequate regulation in the financial markets. Yet in the WTO negotiations on services, further deregulation and liberalization of the financial markets are sought by rich countries, representing the interest of their financial industries. It is without logic that the WTO Director General, Pascal Lamy, has called for a conclusion to the WTO expansion agenda as a solution to the global financial crisis, when its actual policies would, by any sensible estimation, contribute to further instability.

While negotiations on services were not much in the headlines, they were a key part of the WTO agenda in July. While the chair of the services negotiations attempted to pressure countries to expand the current level of services liberalization to the “maximum extent possible,” a group of countries — Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — successfully rejected the maneuver. But going further, they also circulated a proposal to remove health care, education, water, telecommunications, and energy from the WTO, on the basis that these essential public services are human rights which governments have an obligation to provide, and should not be treated as tradable commodities. These efforts were immediately supported by over 100 civil society organizations around the world within 36 hours
Doha at an Impasse: Where do we go from here?

Many fear that the collapse of the multilateral talks will lead to increased pressure for bilateral and regional deals using the same (and often even more extreme) policies as the WTO. As well, each time the Doha Round has “collapsed” it has also been called forth from the dead, and negotiations resumed. And of course, irrespective of the collapse of the attempted expansion, the WTO will continue to regulate global trade in favor of corporate profit and against the interests of workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment.

However, this time is different. Confidence in the particular policies of corporate globalization has eroded significantly since the founding of the WTO, due principally to the abysmal failure of these policies to promote growth, equity, and sustainable development in countries of both the north and the south in the last three decades (and the failure of the WTO to do the same since 1995). As well, studies projecting “gains” from a Doha Round, having been greatly exaggerated by WTO proponents, shrank over time and remained paltry — about one penny per day per person in the developing world. (The best recent summary of the gains and losses is examined here (PDF).)

At the same time, some governments are increasingly experimenting with alternative policies, such as regional integration, resource nationalization, South-South trade, and increasing budgets for health and education, which are delivering growth and prosperity far more effectively. Just to give an example, the increased growth above the Latin American average growth of just Argentina and Venezuela over the last four years has brought combined gains of $140 billion to those two countries. This real economic growth dwarfs the projected gains of $16 billion for all developing countries combined (according to the most recent World Bank projections for a likely Doha conclusion; both figures in constant 2001 dollars.)

Just as importantly, global politics have re-aligned since Doha was launched. Developing countries are far less likely to accept policies handed down by the governments of rich nations, many of them having gained freedom from the economic dictates of the IMF in recent years. And while Brazil, India, and China may be the most oft-cited emerging market powerhouses, developing countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia are increasingly demanding a stronger voice in international fora.

And in the United States, Herculean efforts are being made to ensure that our next Congress and president actually implement the fair trade policies demanded by citizens who have suffered from lost jobs, stagnant real wages, and corporations gone wild for far too long, including through the new TRADE Act.

Civil society organizations have for years developed a number of ideas for a different paradigm for expanding global prosperity and sustainable development, through policies that would establish global financial stability, contribute to solving rather than exacerbating the climate crisis, and that promote countries’ ability to feed their populations, among other goals. In defeating WTO expansion one more time, the political space has been created in which these alternative policies and paradigms could flourish. That space could also shrivel up, if civil society does not keep working to ensure that the negotiations do not resume.

What is needed now is the continued organizing to keep that political space open, coupled with the political will convert the innovative policymaking already in motion into a new economic paradigm globally that can discipline harmful corporate practices while actually increasing growth, reducing poverty, and expanding sustainable development globally. Only then may the victims of that fourth, most neglected crisis — the one in which over a billion of our fellow human citizens today suffer from extreme, often lethal poverty — ever find hope for a better future.

Deborah James is the Director of International Programs for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a Board member of Global Exchange.

From:  sniffenj at un.org
Subject: NEWS RELEASE: Biofuels soon to be measured by international standards.
Date: August 13, 2008

forwarding of News Release from: Charlotte Opal
Tel: + 41 21 693 5351
 charlotte.opal at epfl.ch

Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels - An initiative of the EPFL Energy Center.

Ensuring that biofuels deliver on their promise of sustainability - Biofuels soon to be measured by international standards.

300 experts and representatives of the public and private sector have come
together in the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, housed at the EPFL
Energy Center, to develop global norms for the economic, social, and
environmental impacts of biofuels.

LAUSANNE, 13 August 2008 – Are biofuels a panacea or a threat to climate,
food and energy security? While the answer is indeed “it depends”, pundits
so far have not agreed on global criteria to evaluate the positive or
negative impacts of a certain crop, produced in a certain area, processed
in a certain way into a biofuel to be used in a certain place.

However, such diverse constituencies as businesses, academics and
environmentalists seem closer to a previously unlikely agreement about the
economic, social, and environmental sustainability of biofuels. A critical
step was announced today, when the Steering Board of the Roundtable on
Sustainable Biofuels (RSB), an international initiative hosted by the
Energy Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
(EPFL), endorsed the first draft of a global sustainability standard for
biofuels.

The standard is intended to be used by investors, governments,
corporations, and civil society groups to assess the sustainability of
different biofuels. “With all of the mixed messages we hear about biofuels,
there is a clear need for a standard that can differentiate the good from
the bad,” said Claude Martin, chair of the Roundtable and former
Director-General of WWF International. “For an issue of such seminal
importance, it was necessary to bring many different stakeholder groups
together to agree on how to define and measure sustainable biofuels. The
publication of the first draft standard today represents an important
consensus for how we can judge the development of this industry”.

The draft criteria of the Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels, developed
through a multi-stakeholder process, are based on a comprehensive “land to
tank” analysis, covering the whole chain of biofuels’ production. ‘Version
Zero’ of the standard will now undergo six months of global stakeholder
consultation for incorporation into what will become Version One to be
released in April, 2009. In person feedback sessions on Version Zero are
being planned in East Asia, Europe, Mozambique, Mali, and throughout the
Americas. “Any interested stakeholder is welcome to attend these meetings
or give feedback online,” explained Charlotte Opal, Head of the RSB
Secretariat. “Our hope is that by February 2009, all interested
stakeholders will have had their chance to influence the criteria”.

Over 300 experts from corporations, civil society groups, academic
institutions and government agencies from nearly 40 countries helped draft
Version Zero of the standard, through
teleconferences, an innovative Wiki format  www.bioenergywiki.net), and
in-person meetings in Switzerland, Brazil, China, India and South Africa.
The standard addresses the major issues of concern regarding biofuels’
production, including their potential contribution to climate change
mitigation and rural development; the protection of land and labor rights;
and their impacts on biodiversity, soil pollution, water availability and
food security. Version Zero can be accessed here:
 http://cgse.epfl.ch/page70341.html
.
The Energy Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne,
EPFL (one of the two federal institutes of technology in Switzerland)
houses the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels.

Steering Board members include, among others, individuals from BP, Bunge,
EPFL, the National Wildlife Federation, the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), Petrobras, Shell, Swiss and Dutch federal agencies, TERI-
India, Toyota, UNICA (the Brazilian sugar producers’ union), the World
Economic Forum (WEF), and the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF)

—————————–

The following members of the Roundtable’s Steering Board can be contacted
for interviews:

Barbara Bramble, National Wildlife Federation, USA +1 202 797 6601
Jean-Philippe Denruyter, WWF International, +1 202 822 3459
Lukas Gutzwiller, Swiss Federal Office of Energy, +41 31 322 56 79
Stephan Herbst, Toyota Motor Europe, +32 2 745 2720 (August 13th and 14th
only)
Marcos Jank or Geraldine Kutas, UNICA – Brazilian Sugar Producers’ Union,
care of Rose Racorti, +55 11 3093-4949,
Jürgen Maier, German NGO Forum, +49 (30) 6781 775 88 or +49 171 383 6135,
Martina Otto, United Nations Environment Programme, +33 (1) 44 37 46 91
Hans-Björn Püttgen, Director, EPFL Energy Center, +41 21 693 2473
Roberto Smeraldi, Amigos da Terra – Amazônia Brasileira, +55 (11) 3887-9369
(August 13th and 14th only)

For more information, please call Charlotte Opal, +41 21 693 5351, or
e-mail her at  charlotte.opal at epfl.ch. The Roundtable’s website is
 http://EnergyCenter.epfl.ch/Biofuels.

***********************************
Jim Sniffen
Information Officer
UN Environment Programme
New York
tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210
 info at nyo.unep.org
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How to Survive the Triple Whammy of Energy, Food and Climate Crises

By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on August 5, 2008, Printed on August 11, 2008

 essay originally appeared in TomDispatch, a website run by Tom Engelhardt and associated with The Nation magazine.

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you’re shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Just ask the North Koreans.

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world’s canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe — though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now — escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea’s battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world’s highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land — it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country’s rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il’s political decisions make things any better.

But the peculiarities of North Korea’s political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, “We are all Americans” briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world. If we don’t devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 21st century may be: “We are all North Koreans.”

Through a Glass Darkly

For years, development experts have bemoaned the declining terms of trade that have kept some developing countries, and most poor farmers, mired in poverty. With the exception of the first energy crisis era in the 1970s, between the end of World War II and 2006, food prices never stopped sinking in relation to manufactured goods. Lower food prices are generally a boon for consumers. But they are devastating for the small farmers who make up the vast majority of the world’s poor.

However, over the past three years, according to the World Bank, food prices have increased 83%. That may be only an annoyance for wealthy shoppers, but for the poor, who often devote more than 50% of their incomes to feeding their families, such staggering rises can be the difference between life and death.

There are a number of reasons for this recent spike. The price of oil, now near $140 a barrel, has certainly played a crucial role in this, both by driving inflation generally and because of its importance to modern, large-scale agriculture. So has the recent allocation of ever more agricultural land to biofuel production. U.S. farmers, responsible for 70% of all world corn exports, now dispatch one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, which has had the effect of nearly doubling the price of corn.

Global warming, too, has had an impact. Drought in Australia and the eastern United States, severe flooding in China and Bangladesh, rising ocean levels and fresh water shortages throughout the world are all thought to be related to climate change, though climate scientists cannot prove that any given weather anomaly is caused by global warming. Climate scientists can be fuzzy this way about causality in the short term. Paradoxically, however, they often see the future more clearly. For instance, the top global food policy think-tank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), predicts that global warming will be responsible for a 16% decrease in agricultural gross domestic product globally by 2020. The Center for Global Development argues that developing countries, in particular, will be hit hard by climate change: By 2080, India, its report argues, will see a staggering 30-40% drop in agricultural production and Senegal will plummet 50%.

In the United States, a much-anticipated, Bush-administration-delayed federal study foresees water shortages, more herbicide-resistant weeds, and more insect infestations as a result of climbing temperatures. The present food crisis, concludes Joachim von Braun of the IFPRI, “foreshadows what climate change will bring us.”

The other major driver of food price increases is certainly rising income levels in key developing countries. With more income, people can, of course, eat more, and eat higher off the hog — or, put another way, they can eat hog in the first place, rather than the lentils or cassava on which they were subsisting.

Over a decade ago, Lester Brown, the founder of World Watch, suggested that just such a crisis was on the way. He asked whether the world could possibly produce enough grain to feed a more prosperous China. Now, growing middle classes in China and India, the world’s most populous countries, are, just as he predicted, changing their eating habits and consuming more meat (and so, indirectly, a great deal more grain, which is used to feed the animals they are now cooking).

Lester Brown was ahead of the curve, but there were ample warning signs of an impending food crisis for those ready to see them. Oil prices have been steadily increasing since 2004 as a result of rising demand. They have been helped along greatly by growing chaos in the Middle East, fed by the Bush administration’s foolhardy invasion of Iraq.

Like the North Koreans, we, too, have been trying to squeeze more food out of a limited amount of land: arable land per capita is declining at a steady rate. Falling water tables and dry rivers — think climate change again — have no less surely pointed to a coming crunch for farmers dependent on irrigation. And don’t forget: Critics of biofuels warned time and again that there wasn’t enough elasticity in the food supply to take food out of the mouths of people in the Global South in order to fill the gas tanks of the Global North.

Back in the early 1990s, the North Korean leadership failed to grasp the correlation between rising oil prices, declining food stocks, and environmental stresses — and the political pundits and politicians of the planet conveniently wrote off the resulting catastrophe as uniquely the fault of the world’s weirdest country. Instead of taking a timely hint, wealthier governments simply shrugged off the warnings of scientists, development professionals, and energy specialists about future crises.

Responding to Riots

There’s nothing like a food riot, however, to get wealthy governments to sit up and take notice. Humanitarian organizations and aid officials may be concerned about people quietly starving to death in remote locations, but only when world security suddenly seems threatened and governments totter do rising food prices translate into a full-blown crisis. Washington, for example, woke up when riots broke out in Egypt, Haiti, and Indonesia, and the militaries in Pakistan and Thailand intervened to protect crops and storage facilities.

In response to the sudden crisis splatting on the global windshield, the United Nations food aid agency, the World Food Program, called for $755 million in emergency contributions. Saudi Arabia, its coffers flooded with oil profits, promptly promised $500 million. The World Bank then announced that it was increasing its overall support of global agriculture by $2 billion in 2009, while Washington offered $5 billion in food aid over the next two years.

Such an emergency response may, indeed, be necessary, but it is also distinctly inadequate. The Director-General of the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, has called for a minimum of $30 billion a year for a global agricultural restructuring. It’s not at all clear who will pony up such sums, which, in any case, will be too late for countries like Haiti whose subsistence farmers needed help before their most recent growing seasons started. Most importantly, though, as an approach, it’s too conventional and, in the long run, bound to fail.

After all, the wealthiest countries continue to show little or no interest in altering the policies that have contributed so decisively to the food crisis in the first place. Take the United States. It “ties” — places restrictions on — about 70% of its aid. That means recipient countries must use that aid to buy U.S. products, which, of course, will do little to strengthen local economies. Washington has also cut its international agricultural research by as much as 75% at a time when agricultural production is no longer keeping pace with population increases. Add in the $280 billion farm bill that Congress has just passed which, unbelievably enough, provides continued subsidies to “farmers” (read: agribusiness) already benefiting enormously from high food prices. And the European Union, like the United States, is refusing to backtrack on its commitment to boost biofuels produced from grain.

Nor is there much hope for a new Green Revolution. While the campaign to disseminate modern, industrial agricultural techniques that began in the 1960s did increase food production, rural poverty in the developing world remained endemic (which is why the current food crisis is so devastating to subsistence farmers). Today, a repetition of that Revolution’s combo of hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation, and the heavy application of petroleum-based fertilizers holds little promise.

Water is scarcer. Oil (and thus fertilizer) is considerably more expensive. The promised next stage of the Green Revolution, the application of biotech advances through genetically modified organisms to produce new, high-yield, insect-resistant crops, generally hasn’t lived up to its hype in the developing world.

Yet Western seed companies are taking advantage of the crisis to tout this particular high-tech solution. Oddly enough, all this is depressingly reminiscent of the North Korean leadership’s fascination with quick fixes in the 1990s. North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, for instance, touted potatoes as a miracle crop, but the True Potato Seed project sponsored by the U.S. government never panned out. Giant rabbits produced by a German breeder as a newfangled North Korean livestock were a dead-end, probably because the animals themselves consumed as much food as they ultimately yielded. A variety of high-yield “supercorn” hasn’t yet revolutionized North Korean agriculture. Neither in North Korea nor in the world at large has anyone yet figured out a technical shortcut to permanent cornucopia.

Markets to the Rescue?

Perhaps the most conventional approach to the crisis has been to rely on market mechanisms. Consider the International Food Policy Research Institute, a product of the Green Revolution and its leading booster, and its eight-point plan for solving the crisis. Several of the steps are eminently sensible, such as expanding humanitarian assistance to food-challenged countries, reversing biofuel policies, and investing in social programs such as school feeding programs and health care. In the mix, however, are more of the same old market mantras. IFPRI recommends, for instance, the elimination of the export bans which 40 countries, including India and Indonesia, recently implemented to keep food from flowing out of the country through trade. And it has tried to revive a dead horse by urging further World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations to reduce barriers to global trade in agricultural products.

Pundits and policymakers addressing food problems have called for the elimination of government regulations and tariffs ever since England repealed its Corn Laws in the 1840s. In the last quarter century, the removal of trade restrictions of every sort facilitated greater agricultural production globally. Free trade helped large producers grow more and sell it cheaper abroad. But free trade hasn’t helped the rural poor — or poor countries.

Quite the opposite. The increased concentration of corporate farming and the dismantling of state programs that sustained the agricultural sector have driven small farmers out of business all over the planet, while making many of those who remain ever more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides, fertilizer, and seeds. For instance, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico lost 1.3 million agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to cross into the United States as migrant workers. Even more strikingly, the continent of Africa went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s to a net importer today — thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding roughshod through the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Bank’s “structural adjustment programs” and the WTO’s “tariff reductions” don’t quite have the ring of war, pestilence, famine, and death, but they have been just as devastating.

The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the economy.

After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the large-scale improvement of rural infrastructure — the capital costs are high and profit margins far too low. More controversially, developing countries may need to maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and subsidies to protect local producers. Since it is both sold and consumed, food should be considered a strategic resource, a matter of national security. It should be left out of trade negotiations in the same way that the “national security exception” allows governments to subsidize and protect their military industries as they please.

On Being Canaries

Any response that doesn’t address all three converging trends — rising energy costs, stagnant per-capita agricultural production, and climate change — will ultimately fail, just as it did in North Korea in the early 1990s. Land, energy, and the biosphere are limited resources. And it’s not only a peak in oil that we may be approaching. The depletion of oil resources and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from their current levels have at least entered mainstream discussion. Less well known, however, are the problems of peak land and peak water.

The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous “fencerow-to-fencerow” policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has linked to the glut of corn — and corn syrup — that has so profoundly affected global diets. But re-Butzing American agriculture is no longer an option. “For the first time in our history, we’re pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land,” says Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. ” “We’re in a somewhat fixed box.”

The same applies to the world at large. Although rainforests are still being transformed into farming plots and pasture — only increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere — humanity is reaching the limits of arable land. Chalk it up to urbanization, climate change-caused drought, and a loss of soil fertility through the application of too much fertilizer. Whether forest or farmland, we are losing productive land at a rate of one hectare every 7.67 seconds. Sure, there’s some wiggle room in Africa and Latin America, but bringing this additional land into cultivation will buy us only a little time — at the expense of the overall environment.

The water situation is even more precarious. The world is facing a declining reserve of fresh water with the depletion of underground reserves in India, China, Africa, and even the United States. (Say goodbye to the Midwest’s mighty Ogallala aquifer, which nourishes America’s breadbasket). Aside from the 1.1 billion people who already lack safe drinking water, according to the U.N., this crisis threatens farming, which monopolizes 70% of all fresh water.

Global temperature increases will only aggravate the situation. Rising oceans will inflict death-by-salt on increasing amounts of low-lying farmland, while drought dries up once fertile farming regions. Any intensification of the Green Revolution, dependent as it is on chemical fertilizer and irrigation, is only likely to add to the problem. And don’t count on the oceans to offset the food that will no longer be grown on land. The catch of wild fish has remained pretty much the same since the mid-1980s, and fish farming, too, requires land, water, and energy.

In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive program to address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate, and land and water resource exhaustion. If policymakers take into consideration only one, or even two, of the components of this trinity, they may well end up doing more harm than good. The making of biofuels from corn, for instance, was an attempt to address the problems of the cost of energy and the dangers of climate change, but it neglected to consider the effect on agricultural production — hence, the disastrously soaring price of corn. Calls for the next phase of a Green Revolution, which address agricultural production, are guaranteed to play havoc with the energy and water crises.

Such partial approaches don’t work largely because they assume unlimited resources. The original sin of unrestrained growth can be found in the economic theologies of both communism and capitalism. In these systems, neither the state nor the market has ever operated according to ecological principles. Now, we must quickly explore ways of boosting agricultural production in fundamentally sustainable ways without, somehow, expanding our carbon footprint.

Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green Revolution guru Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as incapable of feeding the world, an important new study published by Cambridge University Press shows that organic systems in developing countries can produce 80% more than conventional farms.

Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy — solar, wind, tidal — will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down on energy use and soil erosion.

While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to be Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, don’t shackle debt-ridden farmers to major seed companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.

Even if global food prices stabilize this year and projections of a record grain harvest hold, the underlying problems will remain.

So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country pulled back from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a serious food crisis, thanks to high energy prices, flooding, and a shortfall in last year’s grain harvest. Once again, North Korea is the world’s canary. As we sit in the dark in the deep hole that we’ve dug for ourselves, will we finally heed its warning?

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

© 2008 Foreign Policy in Focus All rights reserved.

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