Monthly Archives: December 2012

Climate Change

We are already living in the future – but have we got one left?

Christmas Market

Op Ed by Sören Köpke, Managing Editor, Future of Food Journal


My home, a mid-size, half-million-inhabitant city in Northern Germany, is preparing for the holiday season. A few weeks ago they launched the new Christmas lights, a system that cost 1.2 million euros, offering the cosy and warm background that we love so much as we purchase presents for our loved ones. They have set up the traditional Christmas market with its stalls and booths, smelling of gingerbread, doughnuts and hot spiced wine, which ought to attract shoppers from the towns and smaller cities in the vicinity. And they will come a-shopping: Tablet computers, new smartphones and flat-screen TVs are on top of the wish list this season.
As I move through the masses of people packed with shopping bags and boxes even weeks before Christmas Eve, it occurs to me that we are living in the future – the traditional-style holiday scenery just serves as a distraction.

Our smartphones are our most-beloved universal devices that we use to communicate both verbally and in writing, to get directions, to glimpse at all-too-casual news items, to take photographs, you name it. Longer literature, we are reading on eBook-readers. Music and films are downloaded or streamed onto our entertainment stations in our central-heated homes illuminated by energy-saving lamps. The global information network is all-penetrating, providing an abundance of knowledge we could never learn to make our own. We wear triple-layer high-tech rain-garments that would keep us dry in any torrent, but we head into the next café at the first sight of rain. Our money is plastic, our cars are navigated by satellites, our provisions last weeks, courtesy of modern chemistry. This is a future that people 50 years ago may have envisioned for the distant year 2012. We have become utopian fiction, for what it’s worth. Of course, “us” only applies to a relative small portion of the world.

The future the whole planet is heading towards, however, looks bleak. It might look like this:

Multi-million urban areas in coastal zones devastated by floods. The livelihoods of small farmers eliminated by growing deserts. Even more species bound for extinction. Refugees from environmental disasters stopped at gunpoint on the well-armed walls of the western world. Heat waves that make it unbearable to go outside in summer.

Not a grim tale of the end days, but a possible future if the world warms to four degree by the end of the century (or earlier). The World Bank, hardly a club of hardcore eco-warriors, has just released a study that warns of the inhospitality of a plus-for-degree planet.

There’s snow when I look out of my window. Climate change? Doha is far away. That is were the UN Conference on Climate Change is concluding today. But as usual, there is less action than pointing the finger. Industrial nations want the fast-growing developing countries to make pledges to cut emissions. The poorest countries are concerned with acquiring funds to prepare them for the worst consequences of climate change. China is reminding the West of their historic responsibility.

It’s a fact that we, the people in the Global North, are using a lot more than our share of the planet’s resources. China might be the champion of carbon dioxide emissions, but who do you think produces all that hi-tech gear that we give each other for Christmas?

We should start investing in the future instead of surrounding ourselves with more futurism.

 

 

 

Land

Critique of land codes

Efforts to regulate land deals and avoid extreme exploitation of land-dependent people in target countries will create even more inequality, says small-farmers advocacy organization GRAIN:

From the World Bank to pension funds, efforts are under way to regulate land grabs through the creation of codes and standards. The idea is to distinguish those land deals that do meet certain criteria and should be approvingly called “investments” from those that don’t and can continue to be stigmatised as land “grabs”. Up to now, it was mostly international agencies that were trying to do this. Now, the private sector is engaging in a serious way to set its own rules of the game. Either way, the net result is voluntary self-regulation — which is ineffective, unreliable and no remedy for the fundamental wrongness of these deals.

Large-scale foreign land investments, so-called “land-grabs”, have created a lot of reporting over the last few years and provoked criticism of many active in development partnerships and in grassroot farmers’ movements. The hopeful now increasingly rely on sets of codes and standards – with dubious outcomes. This mechanism will only give legitimation to unwanted and harmful, at times practically neo-colonial investment practices, GRAIN insists: “While it is a huge and uphill battle, it’s clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.”