One-Third of World's Food Goes to Waste - UN

Reposted in full from The Guardian, 12 May 2011

'One-third of the world's food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to a study (pdf) released on Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Roughly 1.3bn tonnes of food is either lost or wasted globally due to inefficiencies throughout the food supply chain, says the report, based on research by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (Sik). Amid rising global food prices, the study says that reducing food losses in developing countries could have an "immediate and significant" impact on livelihoods and food security in some of the world's poorest countries.

According to the report, industrialised and developing countries waste or lose roughly the same amount of food each year – 670m and 630m tonnes respectively. But while rich countries waste food primarily at the level of the consumer, the main issue for developing countries is food lost due to weak infrastructure – including poor storage, processing and packaging facilities that lack the capacity to keep produce fresh. Food losses mean lost income for small farmers and higher prices for poor consumers in developing countries, says the study.

The average European or North American consumer wastes 95kg-115kg of food a year, above all fruits and vegetables. In contrast, the average consumer in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia or south-east Asia wastes only 6kg-11kg. The study notes that in developing countries poverty and limited incomes make it unacceptable to waste food, and that poor consumers in low-income countries generally buy smaller amounts of food at a time.

Food wasted by consumers in rich countries (222m tonnes) is roughly equal to the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230m tonnes).

Looking for solutions, the report argues that reducing reliance on retailers such as big supermarkets could help cut food waste in the north, and suggests promoting the direct sale of farm produce to consumers. It also encourages retailers and charities to work together, to distribute unsold but perfectly edible food that would otherwise go to waste.

For developing countries, the study says the key lies in strengthening food supply chains, urging investment in infrastructure and transportation, along with increased attention to food storage, processing and packaging.

While world food prices fell slightly in March this year – after eight months of successive increases – the overall cost of food in April was 36% higher than it was last year. Prices of wheat, maize and soya reached levels last seen in 2008, when a global food crisis sparked food riots across the developing world. Last month, the World Bank said that rising food prices had pushed 44 million more people into extreme poverty, and the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, added that an additional 10 million people could soon fall below the $1.25 a day extreme poverty line unless immediate action was taken to increase the supply of food.

But the FAO-backed report says: "Food production must clearly increase significantly to meet the future demands of an increasing and more affluent world population … In a world with limited natural resources (land, water, energy, fertiliser), and where cost-effective solutions are to be found to produce enough safe and nutritious food for all, reducing food losses should not be a forgotten priority."'

Anxiety Keeps the Super-Rich Safe from Middle-Class Rage

‎'Looking in the wrong direction' is what gets us fighting over what is left and how it allocated among a range of real needs - from disability services, to people seeking asylum/refuge, to ensuring pensioners do not live hand-to-mouth, to having enough doctors and nurses - instead of collectively working on demanding a less extreme pooling of society's wealth at the top.

Reposted in full from The Guardian, 18 May 2011

'Why aren't we more angry? Why isn't blood running, metaphorically at least, in the streets? Evidence of how the rich prosper while everyone else struggles with inflation, public spending cuts and static wages arrives almost daily. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that last year incomes among the top 1% grew at the fastest rate in a decade. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the top 1,000 are £60.2bn better off this year than in 2010, bringing their collective wealth close to the record pre-recession levels.

Now comes a report this week from the High Pay Commission, set up by the Labour pressure group Compass. It reveals that FTSE 100 chief executives are on average paid £4.2m annually, or 145 times the median wage – and on current trends will be paid £8m, or 214 times the median, by 2020. In the financial sector, even the CEO can seem modestly rewarded: this year, the top-paid banker at Barclays will get £14m, nearly four times the chief executive's earnings and 1,128 times more than the lowest-paid employee receives.

Meanwhile, once inflation is taken into account, most people's incomes are set to fall, after 15 years of virtual stagnation. Between 1996-7 and 2007-8, the earnings of someone in the middle of the income distribution rose (1997 prices) from £16,000 to £17,100 – barely £100, or less than 0.7% a year. Even the increase for those quite near the top of the income scale, better off than 90% of their fellow citizens, was unspectacular. Their inflation-discounted pay crept up from £36,700 to £41,500, or less than £450 (1.2%) a year. The top 0.1% scooped the jackpot. They got a £19,000 pay rise every year, taking their incomes to £538,600, a gain of 67% over 11 years. The commission gives no figures for the top 0.01%, but we can be confident they did even better and dramatically so.

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers – now a diminishing minority – but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don't run FTSE 100 companies, to say nothing of the marketing, purchasing, personnel, sales and production executives below them. That is why, over the past decade, some of the most anguished cries about high incomes and inequality have appeared in the Telegraph and Mail.

The commission describes levels of top pay as an instance of "market failure" because most arguments used to defend it just don't stack up. For example, despite claims that pay levels are dictated by global competition, the majority of FTSE 100 CEOs are British, promoted from within their companies. Only one CEO has been poached in the past five years – by a British rival. But top pay also suggests political failure, particularly on the left. To put it crudely, why can't leftwing parties harness middle-class anger against the super-rich? Surveys show a substantial majority of the electorate agree that differences in income are too large and that ordinary people don't get a fair share. Only one in eight disagree. Why is this so difficult to translate into a political programme that could command mass support?

One reason why the working classes so often disappointed the left was that, having little daily contact with the rich and little knowledge of how they lived, they simply didn't think about inequality much, or regard the wealthy as direct competitors for resources. As the sociologist Garry Runciman observed: "Envy is a difficult emotion to sustain across a broad social distance." Nearly 50 years ago he found manual workers were less likely than non-manual workers to think other people were "noticeably better off". Even now most Britons underestimate the rewards of bankers and executives. Top pay has reached such levels that, rather like interstellar distances, what the figures mean is hard to grasp.

But the gap between the richest 1% or 2% and everybody else in the top 20% or 30% is now so great and growing so rapidly that, one might reasonably think, it should change the terms of political trade. The income distance may be huge but the social distance is not. Those in the top 2% and the next 28% have often been to the same schools and universities. More important, they compete for scarce resources: places in fee-charging schools, houses in the best areas, high-end personal services. The super-rich have provoked raging inflation in the prices of these goods. Many of the not-so-rich were born into the professional classes and high expectations. Now, to their surprise, they find themselves struggling. In income distribution, their interests are closer to those of the mass of the population than to people they once saw as their peers.

They are not, however, imminently likely to join a crusade for equality. This generation of the middle classes has internalised the values of individualist aspiration, as zealously propagated by Tony Blair as by Margaret Thatcher. It does not look to the application of social justice to improve its lot. It expects to rely on its own efforts to get ahead and, crucially, to maintain its position.

As psychologists will tell you, fear of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain. The struggling middle classes look down more anxiously than they look up, particularly in recession and sluggish recovery. Polls show they dislike high income inequalities but are lukewarm about redistribution. They worry that they are unlikely to benefit and may even lose from it; and worse still, those below them will be pulled up sufficiently to threaten their status. This is exactly the mindset in the US, where individualist values are more deeply embedded. Americans accepted tax cuts for the rich with equanimity. Better to let the rich keep their money, they calculated, than to have it benefit economic and social inferiors.

As Runciman observed, "most people's lives are governed more by the resentment of narrow inequalities, the cultivation of modest ambitions and the preservation of small differentials" than by the larger picture of social justice. That applies as much to the professional as to the working classes.

But as the super-rich stretch further ahead, appropriating, with the assistance of a Conservative-led government, ever increasing proportions of national resources, Ed Miliband and Labour have the opportunity to build a new cross-class consensus for a more equal society. "The squeezed middle" may be a concept that lacks both precision and passion, but at least it shows Miliband is thinking along the right lines.'

We're Not Broke, Just Twisted: Extreme Wealth Inequality in America

SHARE. You bastards.

Sourced from YouTube, 18 May 2011

OzHarvest Launches in Adelaide

Food rescue charity OzHarvest launched in Adelaide on 17 May. South Australian identity and Adelaide 5AA Radio's Keith Conlon, an OzHarvest Ambassador, offers a peek into how this free service (backed by philanthropic funding) works!

Sourced from 5aa Radio, 17 May 2011

A Strategy for National Security - Sustainability

Excerpt from New York Times, 3 May 2011

'Here’s a proposition: The death of Osama bin Laden brings a moment to talk about something other than threats — not because they don’t exist, but because for the country to see and speak of nothing else is mortally dangerous.

Col. Mark Mykleby, a senior advisor on strategy to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy wrote a paper calling on the United States to focus on social policies, education and sustainability...“A National Strategic Narrative,” a paper written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices in energy and agriculture.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

The two officers each have more than 20 years of service, and now work as special strategic assistants to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their paper, which is not an official policy document, was published last month by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and is available on the center’s Web site, wilsoncenter.org...

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” They go on to say that the country’s security may require “a hard look at the distribution of our treasure,” arguing that the historic focus on defense and protectionism has meant the neglect of international development and diplomacy. And with technology piercing the isolation of nations, they write that the United States has a stake in helping countries held down by illiteracy and poverty.

Finally, they write, the world population is projected to reach nine billion by midcentury and the country must face the demands for water, food, land and energy...'

UN Sees Rise For the World To 10.1 Billion

Reposted in full from the New York Times, 3 May 2011

'The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.

Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.

The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century, the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.

“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York. “Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”

The projections were made by the United Nations population division, which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts. In the new report, the division raised its forecast for the year 2050, estimating that the world would most likely have 9.3 billion people then, an increase of 156 million over the previous estimate for that year, published in 2008.

Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that fertility is not declining as rapidly as expected in some poor countries, and has shown a slight increase in many wealthier countries, including the United States, Britain and Denmark.

The director of the United Nations population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help finance their development, face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on programs that encourage family planning.

Though they were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, such programs have stagnated in many countries, caught up in ideological battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society. Conservatives have attacked such programs as government meddling in private decisions, and in some countries, Catholic groups fought widespread availability of birth control. And some feminists called for less focus on population control and more on empowering women.

Over the past decade, foreign aid to pay for contraceptives — $238 million in 2009 — has barely budged, according to United Nations estimates. The United States has long been the biggest donor, but the budget compromise in Congress last month cut international family planning programs by 5 percent.

“The need has grown, but the availability of family planning services has not,” said Rachel Nugent, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, a research group.

Dr. Zlotnik said in an interview that the revised numbers were based on new forecasting methods and the latest demographic trends. But she cautioned that any forecast looking 90 years into the future comes with a slew of caveats.

That is particularly so for some fast-growing countries whose populations are projected to skyrocket over the next century. For instance, Yemen, a country whose population has quintupled since 1950, to 25 million, would see its numbers quadruple again, to 100 million, by century’s end, if the projections prove accurate. Yemen already depends on food imports and faces critical water shortages.

In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the report projects that population will rise from today’s 162 million to 730 million by 2100. Malawi, a country of 15 million today, could grow to 129 million, the report projected.

The implicit, and possibly questionable, assumption behind these numbers is that food and water will be available for the billions yet unborn, and that potential catastrophes ranging from climate change to wars to epidemics will not serve as a brake on population growth. “It is quite possible for several of these countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not sustainable,” Dr. Zlotnik said.

Well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest countries. Provided with information and voluntary access to birth-control methods, women have chosen to have fewer children in societies as diverse as Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

One message from the new report is that the AIDS epidemic, devastating as it has been, has not been the demographic disaster that was once predicted. Prevalence estimates and projections for the human immunodeficiency virus made for Africa in the 1990s turned out to be too high, and in many populations, treatment with new drug regimens has cut the death rate from the disease.

But the survival of millions of people with AIDS who would have died without treatment, and falling rates of infant and child mortality — both heartening trends — also mean that fertility rates for women need to fall faster to curb population growth, demographers said.

Other factors have slowed change in Africa, experts said, including women’s lack of power in their relationships with men, traditions like early marriage and polygamy, and a dearth of political leadership. While about three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive, the comparable proportions are a quarter of women in East Africa, one in 10 in West Africa, and a mere 7 percent in Central Africa, according to United Nations statistics.

“West and central Africa are the two big regions of the world where the fertility transition is happening, but at a snail’s pace,” said John F. May, a World Bank demographer.

Some studies suggest that providing easy, affordable access to contraceptives is not always sufficient. A trial by Harvard researchers in Lusaka, Zambia, found that only when women had greater autonomy to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer children. Other studies have found that general education for girls plays a critical role, in that literate young women are more likely to understand that family size is a choice.

The new report suggests that China, which has for decades enforced restrictive population policies, could soon enter the ranks of countries with declining populations, peaking at 1.4 billion in the next couple of decades, then falling to 941 million by 2100.

The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and higher fertility among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the United States population will rise from today’s 311 million to 478 million by 2100.'

Rio+20: Toward a New Green Economy - or a Green-Washed Old Economy?

'...20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises...those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual.''

Reposted in full from Grist, 24 March 2011

'I've got good news and bad news about the future of the planet.

Good news first. Next year, a honking big global Earth Summit is coming our way - one with a proud heritage. Formally titled the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the meeting is known as RIO+20 because it will come 20 years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. That original Earth Summit (itself 20 years after the equally important Stockholm Convention on the Environment and Human Development) gave us an embarrassment of policy riches: the Climate Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Sustainable Development Commission, the Precautionary Principle, a long and ambitious list of promises called Agenda 21, The Forest Principles, and much more. Over a hundred heads of state turned up to Rio Di Janeiro last time amidst intense global attention. This time, the reunion party is going back to Rio again on June 4-6 2012. Chances are it will all be a big deal again.

At a recent preparatory meeting in New York, the agenda for this next Earth Summit became clear. The leaders will issue a "focused political document" tackling the transition to a global "green economy" and reform of the international institutions responsible for sustainable development. This second "reform" strand could feasibly restructure everything ranging from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Program to the 500 different multilateral environmental treaties and agreements currently in place. These cover toxic chemicals, ocean conservation, biodiversity, desertification, climate change, ozone depletion, forest protection, and more. Given the rising trends of global temperature, hunger, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss, the existing mishmash of eco-governance is clearly failing to deliver. RIO+20 is a precious chance for decision-makers to take stock of where the world went wrong in the last 20 years and plan intelligently for the next 20. Hopefully RIO+20 will deliver a jolt of political will to the global environmental agenda, as well as a smart plan to get the planet back on track.

Or at least that's the theory. And now we come to the bad news: Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers - one that will dump the promises of the first Rio summit along the way. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries over the poorly defined concept of a global "Green Economy" that will be the centerpiece of the summit.

What is a global green economy? That, of course, is the multi-trillion dollar question. We can all spell out the problems of our current polluting and unjust economy (thoughtlessly dubbed the "brown economy" by less-than race-sensitive commentators). Yet suspicion is running high that the proposed prescriptions for a "green economy" are more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old "greed" economy. The color-coded theory on offer goes like this: We can move from a brown economy to a green economy by investing more greenbacks in the white heat of technology and PINC (Proactive Investment in Natural Capital) including innovative market mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degredation). Just to round off the color palette, ocean states are further arguing that the green economy also needs to be a blue economy.

Confused? The key words to focus on here are "markets" and "technology." Just as the global climate negotiations, most recently in Cancun, have veered away from the difficult job of agreeing to slash emissions and lurched instead toward politically easy gestures on carbon trading and solar panels, so the green economy brigade would like to steer the RIO+20 summit away from addressing the root causes of our ecological crises. They would like the emphasis to be on a "forward looking" effort to establish new financial arrangements based on so-called "ecosystem services" while liberating funds for iconic "green technologies."

Two heavyweight reports from UNEP, on "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" (TEEB) and a "Green Economy Report" (GER) set the tone for this plan. They argue that nature, like an industrial contractor, should be precisely measured and valued according to the natural "services" that it provides - such as water cleaning, carbon sequestration, and nitrogen cycling. Such services can then be paid for, offset, or securitized in the form of invented credits that can be traded to raise conservation money. Meanwhile new "eco-efficient" technologies can be developed and deployed increasing the value of these ecosystem services while also generating revenue. If it sounds more like a business plan than an agreement to protect the Earth that's because business is firmly in the driving seat. The lead author of both the TEEB and GER is an investment banker on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank, and the most vocal cheerleaders are the Davos crowd of Fortune 500 companies and G8 diplomats.

Most alarmingly, some of these voices are positioning the "green economy" as an upgrade or replacement to the "outmoded" concept of "sustainable development" that was agreed on 20 years ago. They seem content to throw out Rio's "baby" of sustainable development out for new green bathwater just as the baby reaches the age of maturity. While "sustainable development" has its problems as an approach, it at least explicitly attempted to enmesh environmental goals in larger social and economic goals such as reducing poverty and creating a just and equitable society. By contrast, the idea of a green economy is sustainable-development-lite - long on technical fixes and band-aid solutions, short on confronting the root causes of poverty, inequality, and oppression that drive environmental destruction.

At a packed side event in New York last week entitled "Whose Green Economy?," Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Salon charged that this repackaged green capitalism was a distraction from the real issues and commitments that RIO+20 needs to address to realize sustainable development. He warned that the new forms of mercantilism and speculation being proposed could further despoil nature while entrenching existing injustices. Indigenous peoples and social justice movements who have fought against land displacement brought about by the REDD+ provisions of the recent Cancun agreement are particularly alarmed that the same commodification approach is now being proposed to extend to soils, oceans, and more. As Uruguayan activist Silvia Ribeiro points out, "In the wake of the largest financial crisis in history, the same bankers who can't even keep their own house in order now claim they can manage the planet. Excuse us for not believing them."

The focus on ill-defined "green technologies" is also problematic. The UNEP Green Economy report bullishly includes biomass incineration and biofuels as possible ingredients in a "green economy" - rising food prices, land grabs, and toxic air pollution aside. The report is agnostic on nuclear power and stops short of endorsing genetically modified crops as part of the green package.

Meanwhile the next suite of technological silver bullets are already being reframed as part of the green economy. Synthetic biology, which makes artificial microbes with unknown biosafety impacts, is being touted as the source of green fuels and green plastics. Nanotechnology, whose toxicity problems raise the specter of a rerun of the asbestos fiasco, is being embraced for solar panel production and water cleanup. Meanwhile geoengineering - the idea of re-engineering the entire planet with clouds of sulphur dust or dumps of iron and charcoal - could easily end up in the broad definition of "green technologies."

If RIO+20 is not to become a handy loophole for every technological wolf to assume green clothing (and funds), governments are going to need to get specific about what is and what isn't a "green and just" technology and to resurrect the precautionary principle first agreed at Rio 20 years ago. The green economy needs some trusted gatekeepers. One proposal, backed by several major groups at the U.N., is the establishment of a formal mechanism to evaluate new and emerging technologies -- such as an International Convention for Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). Such a convention might provide an early-warning function to governments on pitfalls of technological options before they are deployed. An ICENT might have warned against backing ethanol before food prices spiked, or challenged the wisdom of a risky energy technologies long before the wellhead explodes or the tsunami hits the reactor's cooling system. Tragically, governments agreed to a version of such a technology assessment mechanism back in Rio 20 years ago and then never delivered - an act of negligence we are paying for today in human lives, hunger, and environmental damage.

And there's the rub: 20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises. With under 13 months to go, it's now up to all of us in global society to demand that those promises, however belated, be fulfilled. Most importantly those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual. The bad news on the road to Rio is that the hijackers are already seizing the reins. The good news is that we have time to organize massive campaigns to get the Earth Summit back on course - not just for a green economy, but for a green, equitable, and just future.

Hans Rosling: Visualizing Mortality History

Part Minority Report, part storyteller, part magician - the brilliance of Hans Rosling

Sourced from the BBC and Cool Infographics, 15 March 2011

'Hans Rosling, known for some of his famous TED Talks, here tries a little augmented reality with his animated charts showing life expectancy and wealth all over the world for the last 200 years. 120,000 data visualized in this 4 minute video clip from his The Joy of Stats documentary for the BBC.Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development.

Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.'

Mapping Africa

Fascinating look at Africa through its cartological history...note the point about how the Sahara was not always desert, it was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

The audio slideshow cannot be embedded, so watch it here:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12675464

Sourced from the BBC, 14 March 2011

'From one of the earliest depictions of the continent - to the colonial scramble for land - the maps of Africa reveal a great deal about the people who have lived there through the centuries.

To try to shed new light on the African archives held by the Royal Geographical Society, London-based African community groups were asked for their views on the documents.They spoke to Cliff Pereira and Zagba Oyortey - both African-born - who explain here how the maps tell the story of a changing continent.'

America is NOT Broke

An emotional Michael Moore speaks in Madison, Wisconsin, 5 March 2011

'Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.'

America Plus?! Class Warfare in the US

Excerpt from The Daily Kos, 2 March 2011

Screenshot from the segment above

‘…the top 1% wealthiest Americans gobble up more than 1/3 of America's net worth, and the top 10% chow down on almost 3/4 of the money, leaving the bottom 90% with whatever's left. That's why it's called "trickle down".

…a recent article in The Atlantic magazine points out that the wealthiest Americans are now part of a new international elite, "a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with each other than with their countrymen back home".

You see, a really rich American and a really rich Saudi have more to talk about than a really rich American and the 99% of other Americans…

The red line represents the top 1% of Americans. And the flaccid rainbow at the bottom is all you people! What can I say? Sometimes income brackets just drift apart. Over the years, we've just developed different interests. We're into fine wines and racing Bugattis, and you're into different things, like shelter and warmth…

So, if there really is a rich America, and a poor America, I say why not make it official?Let the rich start their own country. Call it America Plus! (Or Golfistan) I mean, we already live in gated communities, I say we just connect them all with really long driveways. To visit, you just need a green card.

Best of all, when we've got America Plus in place, the economy of your country will finally get moving. Because to us, you'll now be cheap foreign labor, and we might just start hiring you again…’

World Unrest - Joining the Dots

'...Whilst much of the mainstream media focussed on the repression of public freedoms, corruption and a lack of democracy as the main cause of popular insurrection (across North Africa and the Middle East), common underlying factors also include the growing levels of inequality, ongoing hikes in the price of basic food and energy, and poor access to housing and welfare services. Whilst Mubarak left office in Egypt with a reported $70 bn dollars of stolen public money, citizens remain saddled with $30 bn of debts despite a poverty rate of 1 in 4 and a recurring food crisis...'

Reposted in full from Sharing The World's Resources, 23 February 2011

'In a dramatic series of events since late 2010, a new and intensified phase of public protest has erupted across both wealthy and poor regions of the world. Right across Europe, harsh programs of financial austerity have led to escalating protests and mass public campaigns; in the Middle East and North Africa, a revolutionary wave of civil unrest is gripping the international media; and less reported are countless smaller anti-government demonstrations taking place across diverse continents. As commentators struggle to keep up with the rapid unfolding of these events, it is worthwhile to reflect on the basic connections between these varied struggles, and to pose a simple question: are we witnessing the birth of a truly international public voice calling for wealth redistribution and wholesale political reform?

The pan-European protests were sparked by government plans to cut public spending, slash welfare benefits and freeze pay in response to economic recession and the debt crisis. With European Union finance ministers agreeing rules that would punish countries that fail to bring their debts under control, a new austerity drive swept across the 16-nation eurozone as governments struggled to trim their huge budget deficits. Both the German and UK coalition governments approved their biggest austerity plans since World War II; Italy and Spain joined Europe's austerity club with massive cuts to public services; France announced its controversial plans to cut spending and raise its retirement and pension ages; while the most debt-stricken countries in the EU - Portugal, Greece and the Irish Republic - committed to draconian austerity packages to please international investors, not to mention the ongoing budget cuts in various other EU countries such as Hungary, Latvia, Romania and the Netherlands.

What's most striking about the public outcry that followed is not only the vast scale of civic protests, but the sense that a majority of European people believe that government austerity measures are unnecessary and deeply unjust. On 29th September 2010, the European Trades Union Confederation (ETUC) organised coordinated demonstrations in European cities, with hundreds of thousands of union members across the region amassing under the banner ‘No to Austerity'. Countless new campaign groups and social movements have also highlighted the distorted priorities of governments who cut public spending as opposed to targeting the excesses of big corporations, bankers and international investors. This included the voices of leading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Christopher Pissarides who argued that austerity measures go in exactly the wrong direction, and are more likely to result in lower economic growth, worsening unemployment and protracted recession. In the words of Attac, the French campaign group who stood by the anti-austerity protesters across Europe: "The radical austerity policies now demanded by the EU are a solution in the interest of the wealthy and the financial actors alone. EU governments intend to implement austerity policies everywhere. ...Their policies can only deepen social inequalities and the present crisis, while making the economic situation in Greece and the rest of the EU even worse."

Out of the scores of anti-cuts groups still springing up at a local and national level across Europe, one that has captured the public imagination more than most is UK Uncut. In late October 2010, a group of London-based young activists thought up an ingenious way of highlighting an alternative to the British governments harsh austerity measures. Rather than simply protesting against public spending cuts, they focused upon the tax-avoidance strategies of rich individuals and big corporations. In a series of direct action protests organised spontaneously through the internet, the informal group has mobilised local protests and temporarily closed down more than a hundred stores in towns and cities across the country. The message of an alternative to austerity measures was brilliantly straight-forward: if the government clamped down on corporate tax avoidance, it would greatly reduce the need for public spending cuts. As the fastest-growing protest movement in the UK, its focus is now shifting to the greed and reckless practices of high street banks. And it's now emerged that similar protests are being organised in North America under the banner US Uncut, with more than 30 demonstrations planned for 26 February - the date of UK Uncut's second "day of action" against the banks.

No to Austerity and Ideology

Common to all the protests in Europe is a recognition of the pro-market ideology that is driving government policies to the detriment of the public good. Since the world stock market crash of 2008, it is increasingly evident that a number of governments are using the economic crisis as an excuse to re-shape the economy in the interests of business. In the UK, for example, George Monbiot recently wrote an article in the Guardian showing how the Chancellor of the Exchequer plans to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it reaches the UK, accompanied by a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax - the lowest rate of any major Western economy. At the same time, the British government is slashing social benefits and public-sector jobs, cutting budgets for government departments, transferring the onus for creating new jobs onto the private sector, and incrementally privatising the National Health Service and state education (with an attempt to privatise thousands of hectares of England's national forests being recently defeated in Parliament). There is no shortage of commentary in the UK pointing out that such policies are ideologically-driven, opportunistic while the country is on the brink of bankruptcy, and even wider in scope than Margaret Thatcher's swingeing program to cut government presence in the economy during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Greece's 110 bn euro rescue package was agreed on the back of a huge austerity drive, civil service and pension cuts, the easing of restrictions on private-sector layoffs, and a large privatisation and structural adjustment programme that is geared more to saving European banks than protecting the livelihoods of the Greek public. The Irish Republic is suffering a comparable fate in return for a joint EU-IMF bailout package worth 85 bn euros. Alongside the harshest tax hikes and budget cuts in the nation's history, the terms of the bailout stipulate that Ireland must get its budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2015 - promising further budget cuts year-on-year regardless of the effect on jobs, welfare rights or the living standards of the majority. Portugal, Spain and possibly Belgium are all lined up for similar treatment. The message is clear: it is not the nation's people that must be bailed out but the financial plutocrats who hold the nation's debt, even if this spells the destruction of the entire post-war European social welfare system.

As many analysts are now pointing out, these savage austerity packages being unleashed across Europe mirror the fate that many developing nations have faced for decades. Scores of indebted countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia have long endured the savage IMF structural adjustment programmes that Ireland, Greece and other EU countries are now suffering. A recent briefing by the Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) explains the similarities and differences between the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, and responses to the debt crisis in the Global South by international financial institutions since the late 1970s. Zambia, for example, made extreme cuts in government spending throughout the 1980s and 1990s under pressure from the IMF, yet the cuts failed to prevent the country's debt from doubling while its economy plunged into recession.

A similar logic was applied to Asian countries following the financial crisis in 1998; foreign private lenders were bailed out, government spending was severely cut back, public companies were further privatised, yet the economy still continued to decline. According to JDC, a common theme is that the public face the costs, not private lenders. And not only is private debt paid for by the public, but the cut-backs in public spending by no means guarantees a reduction in national debt. In effect, ordinary people are forced to pay for the reckless behaviour and mistakes of the financial sector - a reality that is now shared and understood by citizens in both the Global North and South.

Growing gap between rich and poor

A major difference for people in the South is that there is often no guaranteed state provisions or social safety nets that exist for them in the first place. Even in those developing countries still experiencing economic prosperity, most notably in the globalisation "success stories" of India and China, rapid GDP growth is being matched by deepening inequalities and social insecurity. As we know from the World Bank's global poverty statistics, at least 80 percent of the 1.1 billion people who live in India somehow manage to survive on less than $2 a day. In China, still 36 percent of its population survives on less than $2 a day, while the rural-urban income gap has continued to widen alongside increases in inequality of health and education outcomes. As what some call "the greatest migration in world history" continues across China, rural migrant workers arriving in industrial areas often find themselves trapped in abysmal working and living conditions, many without basic health and safety protections.

This definite growth in inequality and the lack of economic opportunity and social security that underpins it has long been a recurring theme across the world. A recent UNCTAD report revealed that there are now twice as many low-income countries than there were 30-40 years ago, and twice as many poor people living in them. Even more indicative of this worrying trend in global inequality is the evidence that a new ‘bottom billion' of the world's poor live in middle-income countries - a dramatic change from just two decades ago when the majority of the poor lived in low-income nations. A growing gulf between the rich and poor is also continuing in many high-income countries, not least in the United States where the top 20 percent of wealthy individuals own about 85 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 percent own very near 0 percent. As the Economist magazine is keen to point out in a special report, there is an ongoing rise in the share of income going to the very top - the highest 1 percent of earners - who constitute a global power elite or ‘superclass' in many countries. At the other end of the scale, evidence suggests that the number of people living in relative poverty could possibly be 4 billion and rising.

This is the context in which we can better understand the sudden eruption of civil unrest across North Africa and the Middle East. Whilst much of the mainstream media focussed on the repression of public freedoms, corruption and a lack of democracy as the main cause of popular insurrection, common underlying factors also include the growing levels of inequality, ongoing hikes in the price of basic food and energy, and poor access to housing and welfare services. Whilst Mubarak left office in Egypt with a reported $70 bn dollars of stolen public money, citizens remain saddled with $30 bn of debts despite a poverty rate of 1 in 4 and a recurring food crisis. Tunisia, a regional poster child for the success of pro-market reforms, is in a similar predicament with crippling graduate unemployment rates of up to 46 percent, despite strong GDP growth. This underlying pattern of protest against social and economic deprivation alongside political repression is being repeated across Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Morocco, Oman, and a number of other countries in the region. All have been spearheaded by the countries' youth, fuelled by social media and television, yet broadly supported by the middle class. In an unprecedented outpouring of goodwill and solidarity, these millions of people on the streets are claiming their democratic right to a fairer share of the vast wealth that their rulers have hoarded for decades.

The pan-Arab protests clearly have much in common with those reacting to austerity across Europe, as well as the millions who have mobilised in support of debt cancellation and an end to ‘economic adjustment' in the South. In every country, the widespread outcomes of debt, austerity, poverty and inequality are the product of political choices - the consequences of a disastrous neoliberal approach to managing a nation and its finances. What we may be witnessing in the popular responses to these hardships is an emerging global consensus in favour of a fundamental reordering of government priorities. In the space of barely a few months, the rapid growth of anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe and massive anti-government protests all over the Middle East indicate the potential for public opinion to take on an international dimension. Given the determination of policymakers across the globe to continue with business as usual, the strengthening of a world public opinion in favour of a more equitable distribution of resources may constitute the first step toward meaningful reforms.

As this increasingly global call for justice unfolds across several continents, an underlying demand being voiced by protesters in different countries is the urgent need for redistribution. Calls for an end to austerity measures, more progressive taxation and the cancellation of debt in the developing world all reflect the need to redistribute wealth and political power downward. An implicit understanding common to all these demands is that governments are better able to secure basic human needs for their citizens through the provision of more effective welfare and social services. The question that remains is whether the need for redistribution can be recognised at the international level where the unequal distribution of power and resources manifests in extreme differences in living standards between the richest and poorest nations. If the case for international sharing captures the public imagination as quickly as the calls for distributive justice in individual countries, the elimination of global poverty could finally become a realistic possibility.'

One Good Cut - Cut Benefits to Bankers, Not Public Services

Money for nothing? How would you feel if someone lent you something that had no real value, had not cost them anything to create - and they asked you to pay it back with interest?

Wondered why we have a Growth Monster on our hands? Fake wealth is driving real social and environmental devastation!

Sourced from One Good Cut, a campaign by Positive Money UK, 21, February 2011

India's Rural Commons at Odds with Surging Industrialization

Excerpt from Shareable, 7 February 2011

'One issue largely absent from the agenda of this January’s global commons conference in Hyderabad, India was the idea of limits to consumption and material accumulation. There were presentations aplenty on how commons are being limited and threatened by development, land-grabbing, and ecological decay, but little discussion of how global consumption, notions of material ‘progress,’ and ‘development’ factor into the evolving equation of how humans and the planet will survive.

With Indian media reporting the likelihood of its nation producing the world’s seven-billionth human sometime this year, the 'inconvenient' question must be addressed forthrightly: how many cars, cell phones, satellite dishes, television sets, and other emblems of material ‘progress’ can the globe withstand? Beyond the more obvious urgency of climate change — the immediate need for radical emissions reductions and greatly expanded carbon sinks, among others — how much more room do the earth and the sky have for the material advancement of our ballooning populace?

I have long resisted the population question myself, rooted as it has been in subtle and sometimes blatant racism as well as echoes of imperialism. The blaming of poorer, developing nations for overpopulation neglects America’s vastly higher per-capita (and until recently, aggregate) carbon footprint — and the profound unfairness of limiting growth in these nations after the industrial and carbon-spewing excesses of the U.S. and Europe must be addressed.

But the facts of climate chaos and the dire need to cut global emissions require an aggressively honest assessment of limits starting with U.S. and other ‘first world’ nations’ concepts of growth and materialism, but also more critically re-defining ‘developing world’ growth in the context of ironclad climatological and earthly limits.

This challenge is acutely of the moment, not only in climate change negotiations, but for another reason that is as inspiring as it is distressing: the agrarian and pastoral commons of India and other developing nations are still with us, and their survival holds the key not only to rural livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people across the world, but very possibly for the planet itself.

While the survival struggles of small Indian farming villages may seem remote to our global future, these are, in fact, contested terrains that the planet-threatening industrialization process has not yet conquered — where there’s actually something left to fight for.

These are the very commons that more than 600 activists and scholars from across the globe defended at the International Association for the Study of the Commons 13th biannual conference in India — common pasture lands, forests, and arable lands upon which millions have relied for basic survival for centuries, under threat now from the unrelenting growth imperative.

Just as the U.S. features deep poverty and undernourishment amid phenomenal wealth and technological advancement, India's development is wildly uneven. A 2010 report by the United Nations found India has far more cell phones than toilets — 45 percent have cell phone access, while just 31 percent are afforded basic sanitation. ''It is a tragic irony to think that, in India, a country now wealthy enough that roughly half of the people own phones," so many do not have "the basic necessity and dignity of a toilet,'' said Zafar Adeel, Director of United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health.

The core problem is this: how do ‘developing’ nations, and the rural poor within those countries, improve their livelihoods and opportunities for a more comfortable and stable existence without replicating unsustainable Western-style ‘progress’? How can India, Bangladesh, and other nations with huge, largely impoverished agrarian populations find a new path for growth that does not entail climate-battering industrialization and mass material consumption?

These questions percolated as a smaller group of conference-goers ventured deep into the south Indian countryside to visit tribal villages dealing with ecological scarcity and the encroaching pressures of industrialization....

India is at once rising and crumbling. Even as the reminders of British colonialism are everywhere (from accents and a troubling economic and social subservience to an obsession with rules and hierarchy), India is surging economically, relentlessly growth-hungry, energetic, seemingly tossing away the final shackles of imperialism. There is an impatient industriousness in the air, furious activity, and plenty of pollution.

There is also a clear and decisive trajectory of industrialization and GDP growth at rates hovering around 9 percent, unheard of outside China. It’s true, as one businessman insists on a flight to Mumbai, that India is growing so rapidly in part because there’s so much room for growth. But there’s no denying that India is on a fast-track to Western-style development replete with booming industrialization, rising corporate power (both economic and political), and a ravenous thirst for middle- and upper-class lifestyles.

And India’s thirst for growth is nearly unrestrained; there is a significant state presence, but no communist- or socialist-style central planning to, at least, potentially check capitalism’s feverishly anarchic path (though state planning in China hasn’t led to any serious checks on air-choking industrial pollution, either).

Instead, what stands in hyper-development’s path are some concerned NGOs like my host and guide, the Foundation for Ecological Security, and a handful of politicians such as Jairam Ramesh, India’s controversial and erudite Minister of Environment and Forests who has blocked a number of dams on the upper Ganges River, much to the fury of fast-growth advocates and big business...

The question that simmers throughout my trip is how can India (not to mention China) possibly continue to ‘grow’ and ‘develop’ in the Western industrial manner, mining its earth and waters and farmlands for GDP and middle-class consumption without destroying itself, eroding its rich and vital agrarian lands, and hastening our ecological demise?

It is profoundly unfair to demand restrictions on India, China, and other emerging nations after the U.S. and Europe have sucked the planet dry for the past century and a half. But this is where we stand now, and reams of climate-change evidence show there is no turning back the ecological clock.

And as 'emerging' nations pursue the classic 'modernization' model of favoring industrial manufacture over agriculture, how will this undermine domestic and global food security? How do we create a new economic system that promotes sustainable agrarian and pastoral lands and livelihoods — beyond preserving selected commons even as the rest of the countryside is imperiled?

How can we ask India to restrain itself as it hurtles ahead to the very material comforts, profits, and pleasures that so many Americans and Europeans take for granted? The U.S. has zero — actually negative — credibility when it comes to setting ecologically responsible global standards, or for relinquishing any of its material excesses which contribute mightily to climate chaos. Not only have we already ‘had our fun’ plundering the planet, we continue to do so with the world’s largest per-capita carbon footprint, even as we pressure India and China to restrain their emissions.

Before demanding slower growth or less industrialization from India and China, it’s essential that the U.S. show some leadership in diminishing both production and consumption of non-essential goods mined from the earth. But that would require a direct confrontation with capitalism’s growth imperative (the unrelenting need for new markets and products, for ‘built-in obsolescence,’ and maximum profit). And that would run counter to the central underpinning of the once-vaunted American economy, now being replicated and steadily surpassed by other nations, eager to join the party.

Will anyone — can anyone — challenge the growth and consumption imperative, before it consumes us all?'

Paul R. Ehrlich: Saving Earth

Interview with Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University researcher, professor and author for more than 50 years - a conservation biologist for decades, he is now turning his inquiry to human cultural evolution

Excerpt from the L.A. Times, 12 February 2011

'...However you draw the map of this melting, freezing world, Ehrlich is on it. He got there in 1968, with the sizzlingly, and to Ehrlich's mind now, regrettably titled book "The Population Bomb." It is replete with "ifs" and "whens" about the catastrophic collision of population versus resources, some of which have come to pass and some of which haven't - yet. On that score, Ehrlich is as gleeful at attacking his critics as they are at going after him.

In his latest book, "Humanity on a Tightrope," coauthored with Robert E. Ornstein, the tightrope could still turn into a lifeline if humans choose the right balance...

One thing I draw from your new book is that you're now calling on individuals to do what institutions have failed to when it comes to saving the planet and ourselves.

That's part of it. We now know more than enough about what the hell is wrong with the world. The climate, the toxification of the planet, the epidemiological environment, the chances of plague, losing biodiversity, the rate of extinction of species -- and we're doing nothing about it. We've had 10 failures now on international attempts to do something about climate change. If we don't figure out how to change human behavior toward sustainability, we're basically … screwed, I think is the technical term.

There's a mechanical model of what's happening to the world: Go into the smallest room of your house, and attached to the floor is a porcelain thing, and if you raise the lid on it and then you look into the bowl and press one of the levers, it will show you what's happening to the environment.

"The Population Bomb," which you and your wife, Anne, wrote more than 40 years ago, includes scenarios that haven't happened. Critics throw these back at you to prove you were wrong then and to suggest you are wrong now.

Scientists live by their reputations with their colleagues, not with Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. I'm attacked almost daily on the blogs.

When we wrote it, there were about 3.5 billion people on the planet; about half a billion of them were hungry. Today there are 7 billion people on the planet and about a billion of them are hungry. We've lost something on the order of 200 million to 400 million to starvation and diseases related to starvation since the book was written. How "wrong" [were] we?

Of course all our predictions were not correct, but a lot of the stuff they say were predictions were scenarios where we said: These are not predictions; these are stories to make you think about the future.

We'd write an entirely different book [today]. We didn't know anything [then] about ozone depletion, what the threat was. The climatologists weren't sure whether it was going to be a problem of more cold or more heat. What we said is, if you're putting crap into the atmosphere, you're going to change the climate.

We mentioned the possibility of having to kayak to the Washington Monument; we also talked about the possibility of [global] cooling. We didn't know what was happening to the tropical forests. There's very little in the book on biodiversity [risks] because the work hadn't been done yet.

What was crystal clear then and is crystal clear today is that one of the major factors is the size of the human population. The I = P x A x T equation -- [human] impact is the product of the number of people, how much each one consumes and the technologies we use for consumption.

People are uncomfortable talking about population - it brings up such intimate choices and the specter of government control over who procreates - but they will talk about consumption. Does that address the problem more palatably?

Everybody who can count up to 20 without taking off their shoes is aware there's a population problem. But most politicians and many economists still think that more consumption is the cure for everything rather than part of the disease.

We know we can change our consumption habits very nearly overnight: In 1941, the U.S. produced almost 4 million passenger cars. Then came Dec. 7, and for the next several years we produced millions of military vehicles, tanks, trucks, thousands of military aircraft and ships, developed nuclear weapons and detonated them, rationed rubber, sugar, coffee, gasoline -- showing that if the incentives are right, [we] can change our consumption patterns, including the way industry works, basically overnight.

When people said Al Gore was crazy when he said we could [quickly] get all of our electricity without using coal, he was saying something that was politically impractical, but it was certainly possible. My research is going into cultural evolution; how you change the way we behave in order to get a sustainable society, when we're moving in the opposite direction.

Is the Obama administration's science leadership on board with this?

Probably. There's never been better science advice in the U.S. government. Obama knows what to do too.

I hear a "but" lurking in there.

This is obviously opinion, but a major problem is that we have corporations now considered to be individuals like you and me. The idea that corporations should have free speech, I think, is insane. The free speech of the corporations is the petroleum industry and their buddies setting up entire institutions to lie to the public about fossil fuels and so on. I'm pretty depressed about that.

If you think that corporations should be treated as individuals, then there's a whole slug of corporations that ought to be in Guantanamo right now being waterboarded.

Still, you sound more optimistic than I am that we can save the day.

[He laughs.] It used to be when people said, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic?," I'd say, I'm pessimistic about where we're going, but I'm optimistic about what we can do. Now I say: I'm very pessimistic about where we're going, and I'm optimistic about what we could do, but I don't expect it to happen. It's a real problem talking to kids. How do you strike the balance? What I usually say is look, there's a 15% chance of preventing the collapse of civilization, if we work at it really hard.

What about the word "conserve" do you think some conservatives don't understand?

I am in many respects a conservative. The idea is to pay attention to what's worked in the past and don't throw those things away until you're pretty damned sure that what you're replacing them with is going to be better.

Human empathy is something you pin your hopes on in the new book. But to me, the sci-fi trope - until the aliens arrive, humans will always find reasons to fight each other - is pretty true.

One of the cheery things I think, and you haven't heard a lot of cheer from me, is we have the built-in capacity to put ourselves in others' shoes. The issue is, can we spread that empathy to 7 billion people? Just in my lifetime, we've spread empathy, making more "us" and fewer "them." If we had another 1,000 years, I'd be an optimist! I'd be saying, well things are going in the right direction, slowly, and by my great-great grandchildren, things could be pretty good. I have a great-granddaughter now; that child is not facing a great world.

You practiced what you preach and had a vasectomy after having one child. Aren't most people only going to do what is convenient and cheap?

I think lots of people are willing to do more but just can't believe it's going to do any good. That's a real problem: You can see what needs to be done, but you say, if I give up meat eating, what difference is it going to make? We are fundamentally social animals, and we've got to organize ourselves into groups. There's lots of groups trying to do good things.

Part of the blame is [on] what we've let happen to our public education system. Think about it -- you can get all the way through most California schools and then get a PhD at Stanford and not have a clue where your food comes from -- [you can] think it comes from the supermarket.

People are desperately trying to spend time getting more income; people don't have any idea about nature now. They think seeing a film about the Serengeti wildebeest migration is equivalent to being there.

You've got to spend time in nature, and that means more than watching a film. It's not that nature films aren't important; it's that they're not a substitute...

One problem ecologists have talking to the general public is that we tend to think in much longer terms than the average economist and even the average person. The average person is concerned with everyday affairs, and to a large extent rightly so, but they've got to [make] some time for the longer term, if they care about their children and grandchildren.

What practical efforts to keep population down would work? I hate to get phallic about it, but how much carrot and how much stick?

Population is the background driver. The standard line, which I really agree with, is, whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control.

First, you work on the rights of women -- job opportunities for women, education, giving women rights -- and in most parts of the world, that would get us where we want to be, a gradual population decline over the next century.

And you get some leadership. If an American president got up and said, "Patriotic Americans stop at two [children]" -- that's where you need some guts. Consumption is equally important. I'd think the biggest problem is figuring out what to do on consumption. We don't have any consumption condoms.'

Empty Handed

Sourced from YouTube, and Million for a Billion, 13 February 2011

'Empty Handed tells the story of women's lack of access to reproductive health supplies in sub-Saharan Africa, and its impact on their lives. The film documents the challenges at each level of the supply chain and identifies key areas for improvement. Empty Handed aims to provoke discussion and mobilize support for reproductive health supplies.

Watch the full documentary at www.empty-handed.org'

Preserving Nature - Does It Condemn the Poor to Poverty?

Reposted in full from The Ecologist, 14 May 2010

'Oxford Economics Professor and former head of Development Research at the World Bank, Paul Collier on reconciling romantic environmentalism and mainstream economics to help poor countries

Matilda Lee: How do environmentalists and economists reconcile vastly differing views about the value of nature?

Paul Collier: The distinction is whether our duty to nature is preservation or stewardship. The romantic wing of environmentalism is uncomfortable with modern life. This view is utterly antipathetic to the fight against global poverty. Romantic environmentalists think the modern economy is the problem. It's not, it's the solution. The challenge is to take it to the parts it hasn't reached.

At the same time, nature is special in the sense that we've got fewer rights over how we use natural assets than over how we use man-made assets. This distinction has not been made so far in economics. The ethical framework that economists use is utilitarianism, which I think is very ill equipped to deal with the problem.

I'm trying to build a simple ethics of nature - different from the conventional economic ethics of the future and also different from the romantic environmentalist position.

What economics has missed - and what I think environmentalists spot immediately - is that natural assets and liabilities are different from other assets and liabilities. What's different is our limited rights over them.

ML: How do you build an ethics of nature in economics?

PC: I'm trying to insert the concept of rights into economics. The future has rights over natural assets. Utilitarianism is very uncomfortable with rights; it's focused on how much happiness I get from consuming in the present - which means that the idea of the future climate is seen as a bit of a nuisance.

If you take a rights-based view, we don't have the right to plunder our natural assets and not leave anything to the future or plunder our natural liabilities and leave a huge load for the future.

The question is: what is the nature of these rights? This depends upon how much value is created when we burn down nature.

Sometimes, in poor societies, it is very important to burn down nature and convert it into more productive assets and hand these on. This is the ethical imperative - that's what stewardship is. Using natural assets productively, creating more value and passing them on is how we will reduce poverty.

But in other cases, the same thought experiment will come up with a different answer - the future may say you are proposing to leave us a nasty climate and we will be awash in man-made assets. The answer is - once you've done that thought experiment - depending on which natural assets, at that stage you have to be pragmatic. There is no substitute for saying, well, what can we convert these natural assets into, and would that be more or less valuable to the future than the natural assets themselves?

Once you come from a doctrinal, ideological position that ‘nature has to be preserved', it will condemn poor societies to poverty.

ML: Over the next ten to 20 years, you argue, by hook or by crook the natural assets in poor countries that are still yet undiscovered will be found and exploited. Wouldn't the future be better off leaving these natural assets untouched?

PC: The amount of money that could come into poor countries is staggering - it dwarfs aid and everything else. One of my nightmares is the idea that the world uses its power over these poor countries to inflict on them solutions that we are not prepared to take ourselves.

If future carbon is going to be a problem then the right answer is to reduce our emissions, but we should do that by taxing the activities which use carbon. That would make coal much less valuable. A lot of the coal in low-income countries would be left in the ground. Oil, no - it's too valuable.

ML: In your book The Plundered Planet, you paint a very grim picture of how the extractive industry functions - with more power, knowledge and resources than most poor country governments, its negotiations over resource rights are very unfair. If these countries are going to exploit these natural assets, how do you propose to ensure the financial benefits go to the countries themselves?

PC: Despite what the Guardian may say, I'm not a utilitarian and I'm not in favour of the extractive industries plundering countries. What I'm trying to advocate is how these poor societies can capture the value of these assets for themselves, and use them well.

Resource extraction companies know the true value of these things much better than governments. The attraction of auctions is that, through competition and bidding, they reveal value.

In the UK, the auction for mobile phone rights earned the Government £20 billion when the Treasury had initially valued the rights as £2 billion.

I also favour aid donations being used to perform geological surveys and prospect for resources. This idea was floated 30-40 years ago in the World Bank and do you know what killed it? A mixture of two interest groups - one the romantic environmentalists and the other the Reagan administration, because of all its links to extractive companies that didn't want to lose these revenues. It was a worst case scenario.

ML: You have an innovative idea of assigning the rights to fish in international waters to the United Nations - do you have any support for this view?

PC: From the UN, sure. 'Think of a better idea' is my challenge. We need to create what economists call rents - it's the intrinsic value of that natural asset. Policing the oceans is not feasible, but you could impose a tax point on the docks at the wholesale fish market, where the large amounts of fish are priced and sold. That would discourage consumption and you could fine tune the tax according to how threatened the fish is, and generate revenues/rents. These could pay for the UN's World Food Program.

ML: You talk about reaching a critical mass of ordinary citizens realising the importance of nature. What are you asking people to do?

PC: One big hole in the governance of natural assets is in the countries of the bottom billion - where governance is weak and there is an intense pressure on governments.

In Ghana, which discovered oil in 2006, and which is a democratic society with decent economic policies, they didn't have a critical mass of understanding of the decision chain and harnessing assets for the benefit of society - so they blew it. Within three years they managed to spend 2/3 of the entire value of the oil, before it was even out of the ground. The oil was plundered by the present generation.

Then we need a critical mass in the more developed countries on transnational issues. It's easy for Russia and Norway to reach a deal on the Arctic, because what they agreed to do is both plunder what is international territory. Why should the countries that border on the Arctic just be able to extend their territories?'