Biodiversity Hold the Key to Humans' Future

Excerpt from G Magazine, 3 May 2010

'...An UN-sponsored report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, published in November 2009, estimates that ecosystem services - from pollination to seed dispersal and air purification to water and nutrient cycling - are worth tens of trillions of dollars to world GDP each year.

The value of biodiversity to recreational activities such as appreciating national parks, birdwatching, hiking, fishing, snorkelling and diving isn't even included in this figure.

"Putting a price on the benefits of nature is not easy but... we are learning about the true value of the natural world and the costs of its loss, said Stavros Dimas, European commissioner for the environment, at the report's launch. "By 2050, the costs of a business as usual scenario on terrestrial biodiversity loss would amount to about 7% of global GDP."

Biodiverse ecosystems store carbon and are also important to fight climate change, say experts, and in this way their economic worth has already been valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.

One successful part of the UN's failed climate talks in December was a bid to stem tropical deforestation. This effort to 'reduce emissions from degradation and deforestation' (REDD) is close to being agreed upon, and would see wealthy nations pay tropical developing nations to restore forests.

Deforestation contributes 17% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all transportation put together, and is estimated to currently cost the world economy US$2 to 5 trillion a year.

Biodiversity isn't important for its economic value alone, though, says Healy Hamilton of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco.

"Biodiversity is the foundation of human well being. You cannot exist without biodiversity, and indeed you are part of it," she says. "Every bite of food you eat is biodiversity. The crop genes for resistance to droughts and disease are biodiversity. Every time you open your medicine cabinet, chances are you are taking a drug that is derived from or inspired by biodiversity. The clothing on your back - cotton, wool, linen, cashmere, hemp - all biodiversity."

There are two ways to look at and value biodiversity, says Brad Murray, and they have roots in very different philosophies. "One philosophy is that biodiversity has an intrinsic value - irrespective of whatever economic values humans might put on the different components. And that is the basis of the second philosophy - that biodiversity should be looked at as an economic asset."

Species and ecosystems represent many millions of years of evolutionary history, and experts argue that it's conceited and egocentric to ignore the intrinsic and aesthetic beauty of the natural world. Murray argues that "we need to take responsibility for the environmental carnage we have caused, and to do this, we need to invest time and energy into prioritising and conserving biodiversity."

The two philosophies are not mutually exclusive and a "healthy view" may be one that weds them in a constructive approach to conservation, he notes. "Linking intrinsic values with human values has the potential to be a very powerful tool for biodiversity conservation that leads to the betterment of the human race."'

Thou Shalt Not Breed: Anglicans

Reposted in full from The Age, 9 May 2010

'The Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration.

Wading into the population debate, the General Synod of the Anglican Church has warned that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine - including the eighth commandment, ''Thou shall not steal''.

In a significant intervention, the Anglican Public Affairs Commission has warned concerned Christians that remaining silent ''is little different from supporting further overpopulation and ecological degradation''.

''Out of care for the whole of creation, particularly the poorest of humanity and the life forms who cannot speak for themselves … it is not responsible to stand by and remain silent,'' a discussion paper by the commission warns.

''Unless we take account of the needs of future life on Earth, there is a case that we break the eighth commandment - 'Thou shall not steal'.''

The discussion paper, prepared in March, claims that federal government financial incentives encouraging childbirth - particularly the baby bonus - should be scrapped and replaced with improved support for parenting through increased paid parental leave.

''In the context of unsustainable global population growth it is inconsistent and arguably irresponsible to provide financial incentives for population increase,'' the paper says.

It also calls on the government to cut total immigration levels, although it says there should be a higher proportion of refugees and family reunion migrants included in Australia's intake.

Anglican Public Affairs Commission chairman Professor John Langmore has also written to Labor MP Kelvin Thomson congratulating him for his strong public statements in favour of lower population growth.

Mr Thomson, who has similarly argued that immigration levels should be cut by more than half and the baby bonus dumped to stabilise the population at 26 million by 2050, said the Anglican Church's position reflected a groundswell of public opinion.

After late last year declaring himself in favour of a ''big Australia'', Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who attends an Anglican Church in Canberra, last month agreed there were legitimate concerns about population growth and appointed Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as Australia's first population minister to develop the country's first population plan.

Mr Rudd's changed public comments on the issue came after the release of Treasury predictions earlier this year that Australia's population would swell from about 22 million to 35.9 million in 2050, with overseas migration by far the biggest contributor.

The discussion paper said population had been virtually a taboo subject, suggesting the debate was being controlled by a range of vested interests. Included are businesses who benefit from the increased demand for houses and goods and services, and governments, who rely on population to produce economic growth.

''Those who do not own their own homes, particularly young people and the poorer members of our community, will find it increasingly difficult to achieve ownership,'' the paper said.'

The Art of Rapid Transition

Sourced from the new economics foundation, 7 June 2010

'We are living in what can only be described as interesting times: a debt-fuelled economic crisis, the looming peak and decline of global oil production, and the potential loss of a climate system able conducive to stable, flourishing societies.

The Art of Rapid Transition [PDF, 1.08MB] was a series of five extraordinary events hosted by nef at the Hay Literary Festival in 2009. They were inspired by the admission by the former Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan that: “I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works”.

There are a range of positive examples, both past and present, which provide a rich source of inspiration for the Great Transition to a new economy. From Cuba, where the response to the sudden loss of cheap oil and subsequent economic collapse was so successful that it was dubbed the ‘anti-model’ in Washington DC, to the spectacular growth of the Transition Town movement, and the lessons that can be learnt from resource-use during war-time, The Art of Rapid Transition presents a range of positive ideas about how to survive (and thrive) in times of crises, and be better equipped to deal with emerging challenges.'

An Eruption of Reality

Snowpocalypse, last year's volcano eruption, floods and cyclones will have nothing on the chaos a solar storm could cause...

Reposted in full from Monbiot, 20 April 2010

'Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.

The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter - tragically for many - the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones - up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortagage defaulters in the United States - the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic - almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano - by no means a monster - keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection - a solar storm - which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive(1,2). It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business - even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.

There’s a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn’t believe it will happen(3). The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the United States Joint Forces Command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.”(4) It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse(5).

His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems - such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply - it’s subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.

Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories. “The strategy of the later Roman Empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the Western Roman Empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.”(6) The empire was ruined by the taxes and levies on manpower Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.

He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a programme of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. The empire survived and expanded.

A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared down, both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialised society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.

For the third time in two years we’ve discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business. The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.

Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry’s social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying - let alone the growth the government anticipates - cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.

References:

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html

2. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16400-major-solar-storm-could-cause-lasting-damage.html

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/14/cross-your-fingers-and-carry-on/

4. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf

5. https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jastallins/public_htm/courses/complexity/readings/Tainter.pdf

6. ibid.'

Living Well On A Low Footprint - in Tuscany

Reposted in full from ZeroFootprint Foundation, 9 June 2010

'Global warming, apocalyptic movies about the future and discussions about the environment can sometimes be a drag. It often seems so dire that one wants to try and ignore the facts and carry on in our unsustainable ways, leaving the problem to future generations.

It doesn’t have to be so - and there is no better way to believe this than to experience it first hand.

Well, here I am in Tuscany at La Petraia, a farm that has been inhabited since the Etruscans called it home 2700 years ago. It’s current re-incarnation - the work of a dedicated, talented, Canadian couple with a vision - is an amazingly beautiful 175 acres in the heart of Tuscany’s Chianti Classico wine district.

Their vision is to create a farm that is truly sustainable and they grow 90% of their food, make their own wine, bake their bread in a wood fired-oven (the flour when they run out of their own comes from the Veneto region just 70 kilometers north) and source almost everything from locals. This is not the 100 mile diet - it is the 100 meter diet!

The bed frames and linens are made by a local families that have been in the businesses since the 19th century; the mattresses are stuffed with sheep’s wool sourced from the nearby Casentino Mountains. The candle holders come from “far” away - Milan.

They grow their own organic fruits and vegetables, watered with drip irrigation methods that waste little. They raise animals to feed their guests. This is not a vegetarian haven and you don’t have to wear Birkenstocks to enter. Women guests are admitted even with makeup in heels and shaved underarms.

One of the most interesting things I saw yesterday was the production of pork and how low a footprint it can have in this blessed part of the world.

The property sits on a hill with a view that is virtually identical to what it was 500 years ago - you can see Siena in the distance. The hills are covered with dense forests of oak and chestnut trees. To raise the pigs they have circled a large area of forest with a fence and the pigs roam the forests. 70% of their diet comes from what they can forage. There are relatively few pigs so it is all very happy here. The meat is produced with relatively low footprint in a sustainable fashion. They also have happy chickens that wander around outside and eat organic feed - same for the ducks, geese and rabbits. This makes everybody happy - the guests, the animals and the environment. I saw the chickens all voluntarily cuddling on their perch at bedtime.

The food is spectacular, the creation of Susan, the visionary and chef. She has a dedicated staff of apprentices from North America, learning how food should be sourced, prepared and eaten. Michael, the other half of the vision, takes care of managing the farm, deciding on where each fruit tree, vine, vegetable and stone should be placed - even where the winery should go. In his spare time he runs a hedge fund. And both have impeccable taste.

Clearly this is an expensive experiment. I see them as pioneers learning how to adapt our modern life-style and desire for conveniences, to one that has all the benefits but none of the extreme downside we are producing today. It is a pilot project, a work of love, but one that proves that sustainable living can be amazing. It is a model that one can learn from and adapt elsewhere. It shatters the myth that high-end needs to mean high footprint. And it doesn’t have to be only for the rich. The locals who work for Michael and Susan live simple versions of this same lifestyle.

This is what good sustainable living should be all about - beautiful, tasty and light on the world.'

Express Free Market Principles - Phone in Sick

Sourced from Anxiety Culture

'Everything they told you is wrong. Working long hours in a depressing job is not in accord with the idea of a “free market”.

But phoning in sick is in accord...

The time has come for people to understand the true economics of sick days.

Phoning in sick is one of the purest expressions of free-market principles.

“Supply and demand” is a free-market cliché commonly spouted (but often misunderstood) by corporate leaders. “Demand” is defined in free-market theory as a demand made by a free, rational individual who is acting out of self-interest. But many “demands” – eg the demand for “status symbol” consumer goods – owe more to saturation advertising and social conformity than to rational, individual self-interest.

And what about the “demand” for jobs in the labour market? When someone is forced by financial necessity to take a low-paid menial job, are they making a free, rational, self-interested demand? Are they saying: “As a free, rational individual, I hereby express my demand to work in a shit job for appalling wages”. Obviously they are not.

In fact, most of our economic activities don’t appear to fit the free-market definition of rational, free, individual, self-interested demands. But there is one demand in our work-obsessed society that undoubtedly does appear rational, individual and self-interested – the demand for more leisure.

In order for “supply and demand” to function properly, demands must be expressed and registered in the marketplace. Unfortunately, employees are usually too afraid to express their demand for more leisure. And if they do express this demand, it tends to go unregistered (eg the boss simply ignores it). Therefore, people express andregister their demand for leisure in the only way open to them: they phone in sick.

Phoning in sick is the responsible way to participate in an economy which is unable to register demand for leisure in any other way. To describe it as “fraud” is stretching legal definitions to absurdity, for the following reasons:

i) A high proportion of employees suffer from work-related anxiety or depression – to a degree and frequency that would be regarded as symptomatic of clinical psychological disorder, even though it might not be acknowledged as “genuine sickness” by the employer (see Government Report A, right).

ii) Studies have shown that working long hours without sufficient breaks has a seriously detrimental effect on health – often before a person notices any outward symptoms of illness (see Government Report B, right).

If you won’t phone in sick because you suffer from a guilty conscience about “dishonesty”, we suggest the following: Imagine, vividly, how you feel at work on a typical Monday morning. That should make you feel queasy. By dictionary definition, “queasy” means ill. Therefore it’s your duty to phone in sick. If you don’t feel queasy at the thought of Monday morning, then by definition you are mentally ill – you might want to consider spending a few years in a nursing home.

Or, to put it another way: prevention is better than cure, so phone in sick before you get ill.

Government Report A

According to a report commissioned in the 90s by the Department of Health, one in seven adults suffers from a psychological disorder. The most common neurosis is a mixed anxiety and depressive disorder, affecting 7.1% of people. The symptoms reported (all indicators of varying degrees of mental illness) were: fatigue, irritability, worry, anxiety, obsessions, depression, sleep problems, lack of concentration, forgetfulness, phobias and unexplained aches or pains brought on by stress. (Source: The Independent, 15/12/1994)

Government Report B

Another study by the Department of Health (“Mental Health and Stress in the Workplace”) found that people working over 48 hours per week have double the risk of coronary heart disease. (Reported on The Money Programme, BBC2, 11/2/1996).'

Green Spaces on City Rooftops

Reposted in full from G Magazine, 29 June 2010

The 2800-m2 roof garden atop the M Central residential complex in Pyrmont, Sydney, was completed in 2005 by landscape architects, 360°. It features native grasses, succulents, vine arbours and mature specimen trees alongside cascading water features, timber boardwalks and sculptures

'An aerial view of most major Australian cities shows only the occasional green patch, stark against an endless procession of grey concrete roofs, paths, car parks and bitumen roads.

As our climate grows inexorably hotter, it’s not unusual for city dwellers to experience daily temperatures more than 7°C higher than those living outside the built-up areas. And such temperature rises in our urban spaces can’t all be blamed on climate change. We have created urban heat islands in our cities by removing the best natural air-conditioning: plants. When we erect concrete jungles, we trap heat rather than regulating it through our flora.

Now gardeners are joining forces with architects to restore a little greenery to our cities by taking advantage of a little-used space – the roof.

“Interest in green roofs is growing substantially around the world,” says Australian landscape architect Jock Gammon.

Living, breathing air-conditioners

One of the most significant benefits of green roofs is their immediate cooling effect, which goes beyond the insulation properties of a layer of soil and plants.

“As the plant transpires water, it reduces surrounding air temperatures and cold air drops down the face of the building. With enough roof gardens, there can be a significant effect on cities,” says architect Paul Downton, who is the co-creator of Adelaide’s groundbreaking Christie Walk eco-development.

Gammon says that a green roof also enhances the performance of solar panels by reducing their operating temperature, making them more efficient.

Canada’s Ryerson University predicted that the city of Toronto could reduce its ambient air temperatures by up to 2°C if around eight per cent of the city’s buildings had green roofs – a total area of around 5,000 ha. They estimated a resulting annual energy use reduction of 114 MW and a corresponding saving in

greenhouse gas emissions of 56,000 tonnes.

Green roofs can also improve air quality. A 1996 NASA study found that a single fig tree purifies 10 cubic metres of air a day; other research showed that one square metre of grass removes about 0.2 kg of particles from the air each year.

In cities, clean rainwater quickly becomes dirty stormwater run-off, but this can be captured instead by green roofs. While plants release some water back into the atmosphere, the rest can be naturally filtered for use by building residents.

Downton names some further benefits: “As well as being quite beautiful, visually, green roofs bring back habitat and increase biodiversity in an area.”

Different cities, different solutions

The most substantial benefit of green roofs in Australian cities will be the evaporative cooling that occurs, says Ben Nicholson, a Melbourne-based town planner, who has toured the world’s best green roof projects.

“Green roofs can reduce the temperature of a roof’s surface by 50°C – it’s really significant. The reduction of heat transfer into the building elements depends on a number of factors, but it also makes a big difference on the surrounding air,” he says.

Overseas, many cities acknowledge the benefits. Tokyo, for example, now requires green roofs to be installed on 20 per cent of the city’s roof surfaces, and many US cities are introducing regulations designed to promote green roofs.

At 600 metres in the sky, one of the world’s highest green roofs is on Chicago’s Willis Tower, formerly called the Sears Tower, which was the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1973. As part of a green retrofit to reduce the building’s energy use by an estimated 80 per cent, an experimental green roof featuring mountainous plants like sedum was installed a year ago on a 90th-floor rooftop, with further rooftop gardens planned.

Australia catching up

Sidonie Carpenter, a landscape architect and president of Green Roofs Australia, admits that the rise of the green roof has been a little slow to take off in Australia, despite our iconic lawn-covered Parliament House.

She points out that roofs in Australia, unlike those in Europe and America, are not built to withstand snow-loads and so retrofitting often involves very expensive structural engineering. Little data exists about the number of green roofs in Australia at this stage, but according to Carpenter:

“There’s real momentum in Australia now; overseas experts have been blown away by the attitude and ability of the people involved in the industry here.”

Future plans

City of Melbourne Councillor Cathy Oke chairs the Eco-City Committee and says she’s excited about the potential of green roofs to transform the city. “Cities have huge heat islands; they are hot and getting hotter and green roofs and vertical gardens are definitely a way to mitigate this,” she says.

Although many cities in Europe and North America have made green roofs mandatory, Oke says that there’s a long way to go before Melbourne follows suit.

Ben Nicholson believes that a strategic policy approach informed by good local data is critical for the success of green roofs. “Engineering, safety and privacy are key town planning issues.

He says there needs to be policy developed across federal, state and local governments including incentives and planning mechanisms to encourage multiple green roof developments in Australia’s cities.

“One green roof will make a difference to a building – but a thousand green roofs will make a difference to a city,” he says.'

Better Than Growth

Sourced from Australian Conservation Foundation, 3 August 2010

"The global financial crisis and the accelerating ecological crisis have prompted many thinkers to reconsider the fundamental underpinnings of economic policy. This is leading to a growing convergence toward the insight that economics must be based on real-world understandings of what contributes most to human wellbeing and ecological sustainability.

It is clear that an economics focused only on the goals of increased production and consumption of material goods, while generally excluding “externalities” like cultural and ecological integrity, is no longer fit for purpose.The Australian Conservation Foundation's work on new economics will advance practical, achievable improvements in economic theory and practice to better promote human wellbeing in an ecologically sustainable way.We are pleased to formally launch our report Better than Growth: The New Economics of Genuine Progress and Quality of Life, a primer for policy innovation.

“Better than Growth” sets out a path for Australia to transform our economy into one that is truly sustainable. The report was launched on 5 August 2010 at a lecture called “What is the World Worth: Putting Nature on the Balance Sheet” with keynote speaker, Pavan Sukhdev.

Pavan is a leading international economist who heads up the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Economy Initiative, as well as the G8 project The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity."

Gambling on Starving the World's Poor

A sad indictment on the moral bankruptcy of some who call themselves human beings. This has to stop. Humanity needs to rid itself of these parasites

Reposted in full from The Independent, 2 July 2010

'By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.

There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into 'derivatives' that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to financial speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutschebank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merryl Lynch - and on, and on, provided they think the price can be jacked up, until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles' crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, 'Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay', explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English.

"Poetry found its break broke with straightforward representation of reality when T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland.' Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. As Lanchester puts it: "With derivatives... there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense.

"So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? How could this parallel universe of speculation affect her? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was itself deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in contracts that were speculating on theoretical food that would be grown in the future - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.

The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on. Even George Soros said this was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices." The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked them to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, Merrill Lynch's spokesman said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were a little more detailed in their response: they said "serious analyses... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a single statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows this speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. This is what happens when you follow the claim that unregulated markets know best to the end of the line. The finance sector's Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict such misery, and barely even notice?

If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How long would it last then? How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble from swelling, probably soon. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. In the UK, the World Development Movement is launching a week of action this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 for your marching orders. In the US, click here to find out what you can do. The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."

Food Costs At Record High As UN Warns Of Volatile Era

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 4 February 2011

'Record high global food prices showed no sign of relenting following a rash of catastrophic weather, highlighted by a major U.S. snowstorm and a cyclone in Australia, which could put yet more pressure on prices and spark further unrest around the world.

The closely watched U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index on Thursday touched its highest level since records began in 1990.

The index rose for the seventh month in a row to 231 in January, topping the peak of 224.1 in June 2008, when the world was last gripped in a food crisis.

"These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come," FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian said in a statement.

Surging food prices have helped fuel the discontent that toppled Tunisia's president in January and that has spilled over to Egypt and Jordan, raising expectations other countries in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged global leaders to "put food first" and wake up to the need to curb price volatility.

"We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices," he told Reuters in an interview.

SUPPLY THE KEY

Catastrophic storms and droughts have been battering the world's leading agriculture countries in recent months, including flooding and a massive cyclone in Australia and a powerful winter storm that swept across parts of the United States.

Dubbed "Stormageddon," one of the biggest snowstorm in decades dumped up to 20 inches of snow in some parts of the U.S. grain belt this week, paralyzing grain and livestock movement. Meanwhile, more cold weather in the U.S. Plains ignited concerns the region's winter wheat lacked adequate insulating moisture.

U.S. wheat prices surged to 2-1/2 year highs on Thursday before retreating slightly on profit taking, along with prices of the other big crops such as corn and soybeans. But traders said pressure remains on wheat prices with forecast for more cold in the U.S. Midwest.

Sugar prices also surged to three-decade highs on fears of damage Cyclone Yasi would bring to the Australian cane crop. Prices for Malaysian palm oil, a cooking staple in the developing world, hit 3-year highs on flooding.

Big companies have had to adjust to higher raw material costs. Kellogg Co, the world's largest breakfast cereal company, said on Thursday it has boosted prices on many of its products to offset rising costs for ingredients such as grains and sugar.

"Today's announcement by the Food and Agriculture Organization should ring alarm bells in capitals around the world," said Gawain Kripke, a policy and research director for Oxfam America, an international development group.

"Governments must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past when countries reacted to spiraling prices by banning exports and hoarding food. This will only make the situation worse and it is the world's poorest people who will pay the price," he said.

Janis Huebner, economist at Germany's DekaBank said inflation partly fueled by increasing food prices could in turn trigger interest rate rises in several countries this year."This could mean a slowing down of growth in the countries which raise their interest rates," he said. "This could involve Asian countries and other regions, this would somewhat brake growth but I do not expect a hard landing."

STOCK BUILDING

Some countries, particularly where food prices loom large in household budgets, have been building up food stocks to contain prices -- and to limit the political and social fallout.

During the last food price crisis, the World Bank estimated that some 870 million people in developing countries were hungry or malnourished. The FAO estimates that number has increased to 925 million.

"2008 should have been a wake-up call, but I'm not yet sure all the countries in the world that we need to support this have woken up to it," the World Bank's Zoellick said.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia's biggest economy, last week bought 820,000 metric tons of rice, lifting rice prices, while suspending import duties on rice, soybeans and wheat.

Algeria last week bought almost 1 million metric tons of wheat, bringing its purchases to at least 1.75 million since the start of January, and ordered a speeding up of grain imports.

On a day of bloody confrontation in Egypt, where protesters are demanding an end to the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, the U.N. World Food Programme's executive director Josette Sheeran said the world was now in an era where it had to be very serious about food supply.

"If people don't have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die. We need a better action plan," she said.'

Christie Walk - A Piece of Ecocity

Sourced from Change Media

I am very proud to have had a long association with Urban Ecology Australia and the hundreds of volunteers who contributed thousands and thousands of hours of work to realise this piece of ecocity.

Site tours of Christie Walk are held on the third Sunday of each month at 11am, 105 Sturt Street, Adelaide; cost $18 ($15 member/concession/child); booking essential, phone UEA on (08) 8212 6760

CHALLENGE: Change Media worked with members of the Christie Walk eco-housing project and Urban Ecology Australia to document and produce an exceptional resource about Christie Walk as an example of sustainable urban development.

Over four days Change Media delivered training in digital media and created two inspiring documentaries about one of the only inner-city eco-housing projects in the world.

OUTCOMES:

During the production in Adelaide’s CBD members of the Christie Walk community, alongside experts from Urban Ecology Australia involved in creating Christie Walk, shared their insights into sustainability, biodiversity and community living, and learned skills in film narrative, conducted interviews and took part in the editing.

The result is an inspiring educational resource about one of Australia’s leading eco-housing initiatives.

The project was an overwhelming success. The team collected over 15 hours of fantastic footage, photos and interviews, and together with the community decided to make two different films instead of one: a 10 minute promotional short documentary and a 35-min educational documentary following two resident hosts on their guided visitor-tour through the project as they guide a tour group through the project.

Besides taking part in the production, the workshop participants learned skills in media literacy, production management, screen language and visual representation of ecological issues. The educational sustainability resource DVD featuring both films will be available in January 2011 in our online shop and at Urban Ecology Australia.

SCREENINGS & AWARDS:

An official launch is planned for February 2011, please contact Urban Ecology Australia for further details.

You can purchase the documentary together with the 35min guided tour on DVD in Change Media's online shop and at Urban Ecology Australia.

IMPACT & FEEDBACK:

The production process was a lot of fun and our team felt instantly at home at Christie Walk. Working through a host of issues and talking points to be addressed in the documentary, the team decided to document one of the Christie Walk guided tours. The resulting 35 minute documentary offers a great insight into sustainable inner-city living, covering issues of biodiversity, design, eco-building and community development, including a look into one of Adelaide’s first strawbale houses, the advantages of building with Hebel blocks and double-glazed windows, as well as clever garden design and careful recycling practice.

PARTNERS:

Arts SA Partnerships for Healthy Communities; Urban Ecology Australia; Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board; CSR Hebel; Tallstoreez Productionz