Climate-smart
agriculture is corporate green-washing
Published in SUNS #7881 dated 25 September 2014
New York, 24 Sep (IPS/Thalif Deen) -- On the sidelines of the UN's
heavily hyped Climate Summit, the newly-launched Global Alliance for
Climate-Smart Agriculture announced plans to protect some 500 million
farmers worldwide from climate change and "help achieve sustainable
and equitable increases in agricultural productivity and incomes."
But the announcement by the Global Alliance, which includes more than
20 governments, 30 organisations and corporations, including Fortune
500 companies McDonald's and Kelloggs, was greeted with apprehension
by a coalition of over 100 civil society organisations (CSOs).
It is a backhanded gesture, warned the coalition, which "rejected"
the announcement as "a deceptive and deeply contradictory initiative."
"The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture will not deliver
the solutions that we so urgently need. Instead, climate-smart agriculture
provides a dangerous platform for corporations to implement the very
activities we oppose," the coalition said.
"By endorsing the activities of the planet's worst climate offenders
in agribusiness and industrial agriculture, the Alliance will undermine
the very objectives that it claims to aim for."
The 107 CSOs include ActionAid International, Friends of the Earth
International, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural
Movements, the South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication, the Third
World Network, the Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, Biofuel Watch
and the National Network on Right to Food.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who gave his blessing to the Global
Alliance, said: "I am glad to see action that will increase agricultural
productivity, build resilience for farmers and reduce carbon emissions."
These efforts, he said, will improve food and nutrition security for
billions of people. With demand for food set to increase 60 per cent
by 2050, agricultural practices are transforming to meet the challenge
of food security for the world's 9.0 billion people while reducing
emissions, he asserted.
But the coalition said: "Although some organisations have constructively
engaged in good faith for several months with the Global Alliance
to express serious concerns, these concerns have been ignored."
Instead, the Alliance "is clearly being structured to serve big
business interests, not to address the climate crisis," the coalition
said.
The coalition also pointed out that companies with activities resulting
in dire social impacts on farmers and communities, such as those driving
land grabbing or promoting genetically modified (GM) seeds, already
claim they are climate-smart.
Yara (the world's largest fertiliser manufacturer), Syngenta (GM seeds),
McDonald's, and Walmart are all at the climate-smart table, it added.
"Climate-smart agriculture will serve as a new promotional space
for the planet's worst social and environmental offenders in agriculture.
"The proposed Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture seems
to be yet another strategy by powerful players to prop up industrial
agriculture, which undermines the basic human right to food. It is
nothing new, nothing innovative, and not what we need," the coalition
declared.
Meenakshi Raman, coordinator of the Climate Change Programme at the
Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS the world seed, agrochemical
and biotechnology markets are dominated by a few mega companies.
She said these companies have a vested interest in maintaining monoculture
farming systems which are carbon intensive and depend on external
inputs.
"These companies will do all they can to maintain their market
dominance and prevent genuine agroecology agriculture from gaining
ground in countries," she said.
It is vital that such oligopoly practices are disallowed and regulated,
said Raman. "Hence the need for radical overhaul of the current
unfair systems in place with real reform at the international level."
Meanwhile, the Washington-based Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), said the world's foremost agriculture
experts have determined that preventing climate change from damaging
food production and destabilising some of the world's most volatile
regions will require reaching out to at least half a billion farmers,
fishers, pastoralists, livestock keepers and foresters.
The goal is to help them learn farming techniques and obtain farming
technologies that will allow them to adapt to more stressful production
conditions and also reduce their own contributions to climate change,
said CGIAR.
These researchers are already working with farmers in sub-Saharan
Africa and South Asia to refine new climate-oriented technologies
and techniques via what are essentially outdoor laboratories for innovations
called climate-smart villages.
The villages' approach to crafting climate change solutions is proving
extremely popular with all involved, and now the Indian state of Maharashtra
(population 112.3 million) plans to set up 1,000 climate smart villages,
CGIAR said.
Asked for specifics, Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research
Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS),
told IPS countries in the tropics will be particularly impacted, especially
those that are already under-developed because such countries don't
have the resources to adapt and respond to extreme weather conditions.
These include many countries in the Sahel region, Bangladesh, India
and Indonesia, plus countries in Latin America.
Asked if these countries are succeeding in coping with the impending
crisis, he said there are good cases of isolated successes, but in
general they are not coping.
For example, one success is in Niger where five million trees have
been planted, that help both adaptation and mitigation, but an enormous
number of other activities are needed, he added.
Raman told IPS there are many rules in the World Trade Organisation's
(WTO) agriculture agreement that threaten small-scale agriculture
and agroecology farming systems in the developing world.
She said developed countries are allowed to provide billions of dollars
in subsidies to their agricultural producers whose products are then
exported and dumped on developing countries, whose farming systems
are then displaced or threatened with artificially cheap products.
Many developing countries, she pointed out, were also forced to remove
the protection they had or have for their domestic agriculture, either
through the WTO, the World Bank policies under structural adjustment
and free trade agreements.
"These policies do not allow developing country governments to
protect small farmers and their domestic agriculture," she said.
Such rules and policies are unfair and unethical and should not be
allowed as they undermine small farmers and agroecology systems, Raman
declared. +
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This article was written and distributed by IPS news agency. It was
published in SUNS #7881 dated 25 September 2014. We thank IPS and
SUNS for our re-distributing this article.