Civil Society Statement Sent to The Hague Conference on Agriculture, Food Security, and Climate Change

Dozens of civil society organizations have sent a statement of concern to the organizers of theGlobal Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change on Sunday, 31 October—the first day of the conference. The six day conference in The Hague was organized by the Government of the Netherlands in cooperation with the Governments of Ethiopia, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, and Vietnam, as well as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Civil Society groups demand that the voices of the world’s poor and vulnerable be heard at the Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (Photo Credit: Bernard Pollack)

The conference aims to produce concrete measures for linking agricultural policies and investments to low-carbon, climate resilient agricultural approaches. The organizers are attempting to make agriculture more central in climate negotiations at the upcoming Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico later this month. The civil society statement of concern supports that effort, but expresses serious doubts about the process—saying “top down solutions are not legitimate solutions.”

The civil society statement outlined what its signatories considered essential if the process at the conference was going to support “fair and effective solutions to the agriculture and climate crises.” The statement demanded:

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FAO Seed Distribution and the Biopiracy Controversy

In rural parts of the developing world where many people depend on subsistence farming practices, food security is not about consistent access to a supermarket but about consistent access to seed. Small farmers typically depend on local seed systems, that farmers save and exchange seed, as well as commercial suppliers for the seeds that they have to buy from agro-dealers.

The FAO has begun seed aid efforts to help countries in crisis, but many are concerned about possible biopiracy that could come with it. (Photo credit: Bernard Pollack) 

Often, though, access to seeds is tenuous. Commercial seeds can be prohibitively expensive and because of inadequate storage facilities, local supplies are often at risk of disease, pests, and inclement weather. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Pakistani farmers lost an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 metric tons of wheat seed in this year’s devastating floods.

Lacking access to quality seed, many smallholders are unable to produce adequate amounts of food for their communities. Making things even more difficult, in farming communities that depend on saved seed a crisis like a flood, drought, or crop failure can extend food shortages into the next season because farmers have to depend on damaged/old seed or are left scrambling to find a new source.

Recognizing that seed security means food security in many parts of the world, the FAO has made establishing sustainable seed systems a priority.

In countries in crisis, the FAO, with the help of the European Union Food Facility, have been distributing emergency seed supplies. Beginning in November in Pakistan, these two groups began handing out wheat seed, and this past summer they distributed seed in Burkina Faso, where droughts devastated crop yields, forcing many people to eat their seed as food. And in Nicaragua, the European Union and FAO have started working with the local government to provide farmers with “quality seeds” that could boost the country’s agricultural productivity.

But despite the apparent good intentions of such efforts, there’s still reason to be concerned.

Seed aid may create long-term problems in much the same way food aid does.

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Time to end war against the earth

Vandana Shiva
November 4, 2010

When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.

A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth’s resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.

The continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and onwards are not only about “blood for oil”. As they unfold, we will see that they are about blood for food, blood for genes and biodiversity and blood for water.

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Will the Food Safety Modernization Act Harm Small Farms or Producers?

Word has it that debate and voting of the Food Safety Modernization Act will begin this Wednesday in the Senate. If passed, S. 510 will greatly expand the FDA’s authority over both processed foods and fresh fruits and vegetables. Will it thus make all of us eaters less likely to get sick? Last week, our esteemed panelists agreed that it will, with some caveats. Read the article from grist.com

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From Slash and Burn to Sustainable Development from the Grassroots in Northeast India

I know all about food security,” says Mitharam Maslai, a farmer from India’s Northeast highlands. “We ate only pumpkin and bamboo shoots every year for two to three weeks because we had run out of rice.”

IFAD is helping farmers in isolated Northeast India sustainably manage the rich local environment. (Photo Credit: IFAD)

Using a traditional ‘slash and burn’ method of farming known as jhum, indigenous villagers in this remote region were not producing enough rice to feed their families for the entire year. To address this problem, theInternational Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) started a project to introduce new farming methods to the region—emphasizing sustainable resource management—in the states of Meghalaya, Manipur, and Assam.

Environmental degradation was deepening the problem—people, not surprisingly, depend on the exploitation of natural resources to get them through the lean periods. Forest fruits and vegetables, medicinal plants, timber, and charcoal were often overharvested to supplement diets and incomes, contributing to deforestation, erosion, and loss of biodiversity.

Northeast India is considered a biodiversity hotspot and contains some of the subcontinent’s last remaining rainforest.

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Video: Poetry for inspiration — Wendell Berry introduced by Bill McKibben

Here’s a video of Wendell Berry reading a poem which captures our predicament and brings it home to us.

Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, Henry County, Kentucky) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays.

See the video.

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Anti-Frankenfish Candidates Win 2010 Races

The Obama Administration is considering approval of the first genetically modified animal, a fast-growing GMO salmon Frankenfish. Several Senators and Members of Congress have been putting pressure on the Obama’s FDA to stop the Frankenfish, and, short of that, to at least require it to be labeled “GMO.” And, they’re all still in office after the 2010 mid-term elections!

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Young Chinese Farmers Sowing Seeds for Organic Revolution

IN CHONGMING ISLAND, CHINA The small-scale farmer is a dying breed in China, made up mostly of the elderly left behind in the mass exodus of migrant workers to much higher-paying jobs in industrial cities.

But on an island called Chongming, a two-hour drive east of Shanghai, a group of young urban professionals has begun to buck the trend. They are giving up high-paying salaries in the city and applying their business and Internet savvy to once-abandoned properties. They are trying to teach customers concepts such as eating local and sustainability. And they are spearheading a fledgling movement that has long existed in the Western world but is only beginning to emerge in modern China: green living.

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Tapping Into Innovative Practices to Feed the World: An Interview with Mark Muller

Mark Muller, director of the Food and Society Fellows program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), talks with Nourishing the Planet’s research intern, Abby Massey, about the global food system and the impact it has on farmers, hunger and the environment.

How do agricultural policies affect the local and global market?

Mark Muller discusses the challenges farmers face today and suggests policies to improve their future. (Photo Credit: Bernard Pollack)

Over the past 10 to 12 years, I’ve spent a majority of my time peripherally involved with the U.S. Farm Bill. And we at the IATP have been leaders in pointing out some of the dumping issues of U.S. farm prices.

In the 1980s, both in the United States and elsewhere, farmers were suffering from low prices that were well below what the market should bear in terms of the cost of producing corn, soybeans, cotton, and rice—the basic commodities. U.S. agricultural policies have helped drive down the price of commodities so low that it has created a lot of problems for U.S. farmers, and the way we make up for that problem is with the government payment program. So it costs taxpayers quite a bit to support such low prices.

And what has largely gone unforeseen is how the dumping—that is, selling agricultural commodities well below the cost of production—on international markets has had a tremendous impact on farmers around the world, because there is no way they can compete with these dumped commodities priced so low. There has been pretty good documentation in the past three years of the depopulation of the Mexican countryside and the impact of the U.S. dumping of corn on Mexico, which NAFTA has contributed significantly to. This dumping has driven a lot of Mexican campesinos into Mexico City or across the border because there is no viable economy anymore for agricultural production in much of Mexico.

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Great news: UN Agrees Moratorium on Geoengineering Experiments!!

Geoengineering Moratorium at UN Ministerial in Japan

Risky Climate Techno-fixes Blocked

NAGOYA, Japan – In a landmark consensus decision, the 193-member UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will close its tenth biennial meeting with a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects and experiments.   “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus,” stated Silvia Ribeiro, Latin American Director of ETC Group.

The agreement, reached during the ministerial portion of the two-week meeting which included 110 environment ministers, asks governments to ensure  that no geoengineering activities take place until risks to the environmental and biodiversity and associated social, cultural and economic impacts risks have been appropriately considered as well as the socio-economic impacts. The CBD secretariat was also instructed to report back on various geoengineering proposals and potential intergovernmental regulatory measures.

The unusually strong consensus decision builds on the 2008 moratorium on ocean fertilization.  That agreement, negotiated at COP 9 in Bonn, put the brakes on a litany of failed “experiments” – both public and private – to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in the oceans’ depths by spreading nutrients on the sea surface.  Since then, attention has turned to a range of futuristic proposals to block a percentage of solar radiation via large-scale interventions in the atmosphere, stratosphere and outer space that would alter global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

“This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs,” said ETC Group Executive Director Pat Mooney.  “This decision is a victory for common sense, and for precaution.  It will not inhibit legitimate scientific research.

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