Grains Gone Wild

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 7, 2008 “New York Times”

These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people.

 I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.

Let’s start with the things that aren’t anyone’s fault.

First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.

Second, there’s the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive: a lot of B.T.U.’s go into producing fertilizer, running tractors and, not least, transporting farm products to consumers. With oil persistently above $100 per barrel, energy costs have become a major factor driving up agricultural costs.

High oil prices, by the way, also have a lot to do with the growth of China and other emerging economies. Directly and indirectly, these rising economic powers are competing with the rest of us for scarce resources, including oil and farmland, driving up prices for raw materials of all sorts.

Third, there has been a run of bad weather in key growing areas. In particular, Australia, normally the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic drought.

O.K., I said that these factors behind the food crisis aren’t anyone’s fault, but that’s not quite true. The rise of China and other emerging economies is the main force driving oil prices, but the invasion of Iraq — which proponents promised would lead to cheap oil — has also reduced oil supplies below what they would have been otherwise.

Avaaz.org (if you want to make a meaningful donation)

Huge news out of Japan: a top newspaper is reporting a major shift in climate policy, and citing Avaaz members as one of the reasons why!

The paper reports that at a critical, high-level meeting on global warming, the Environment Minister held up Avaaz’s “Titanic” newspaper ad from the Bali summit–showing Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda, with Bush, steering towards climate disaster… along with a call for tough 2020 emissions targets, signed by 90,000 Avaaz members.

“The world sees Japan as a force resisting change! Are we okay with this?” the minister asked. The Chief Cabinet Minister suggested setting a target. Days later, Prime Minister Fukuda announced his decision: at last, Japan would set a 2020 emissions target!

This is a genuine victory. Japan is a huge polluter, a key Bush ally, and host of this summer’s crucial G8 summit. Congratulations to everyone for the positive role we all played!

Japan’s not the only example. Here are some other moments when rapid-response people power made a difference in 2007:
Burma: When news broke in October of the violent crackdown against protesting monks, Avaaz members scrambled into action. Within 96 hours, more than half a million people called on the Chinese government to intervene, and Avaaz ran the total count in a full-page ad in one of the most influential global newspapers. Shamed, China successfully pushed Burma to start talks with the UN and with pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burma campaign continues to build.

Global poverty: When World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz’s personal corruption undermined the Bank’s programme to encourage good government, Avaaz members joined the cry for new leadership. With global media looking on, we hand-delivered 50,000 signatures to World Bank Headquarters. Wolfowitz resigned days later.

Global warming: In addition to the “Titanic” ad that moved Japan, more than 320,000 Avaaz members took action in real time during the Bali summit–successfully reversing Canada’s obstructionism and isolating Bush as he attempted to scuttle any agreement. While just a first step, the “Bali Road Map” set the stage for climate breakthroughs this year and next.
What urgent moments will 2008 bring? Some we can predict–most we cannot.

What we do know for certain is that the new year will bring serious threats and golden opportunities. We know that in those critical moments, acting quickly can make all the difference. And we know that if we all contribute a little bit now, we’ll be sure that whatever comes–and whatever is required of us–we will be ready.

Avaaz depends on Avaaz members like you to fund our campaigns. Don’t wait for “someone else” to step in–we’re it. To make a secure, online contribution to the 2008 Crisis Action Fund, just click the link below:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/crisis_action_fund_2/5.php

Does nature experience love?

I think it does….  a few of us went down to the beach today when the rain stopped and the clouds kind of cleared, and we brought along a camera. As we started taking some sweet shots of the sunshine breaking through the dark clouds and reflecting off of the wet sand, we noticed a seagull that was just chillin. It was standing in a shallow pool and his (her?) body remained completely still for at least 5 minutes. Was he merely taking a moment’s break in his ongoing quest for safety, security, and satisfying his basic needs? Or was he pondering, perhaps contemplating the meaning of life? Perhaps he was as awestruck as we were at the amazing symmetry found in nature. As we stared out into the water, we noticed a family of ducks just chillin out in the water. They were bobbing up and down, back and forth,  completely in rhythm to the lull of the ocean. Completely at peace….

The pace of life of nature is wonderful. How different our lives are…. perpetually rushing through the hyperactive business culture lifestyle that we feel is natural, yet in reality is completely out of touch with nature.

The incredible beauty found in nature and in life is anything but ’simple’… but the ’simple’ life (as our society loves to derogatorily call it) is so much more vibrant, gentle, compassionate, organic, and fulfilling than a life clung to material desires.

Peace and Love,

D

Sign an email petition to tell Harper to shape up in Bali UN Summit on climate change

Dear friends,

Right now, a major UN summit in Bali has just a few days left to hammer out an agreement on stopping catastrophic climate change. But instead of helping out, Canada is actually sabotaging the UN talks! On Saturday, experts gave us the global “fossil” award for being the worst country in the world on climate change.

There’s still a few days left to save Canada’s reputation — and the climate — but we need a massive democratic roar to remind our Prime Minister what Canada is all about, and stop him from blocking the world at Bali. Click below to sign the petition and we’ll advertize the number of signatures we get in an ad campaign across Canada this week. Our goal is to get 25,000 people to sign in just 3 days before the ads run. Click below, then forward this email to all your friends and family right away:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/another_canadian_climate_crime/4.php

Enough is enough. Prime Minister Harper’s short-sighted, undemocratic and big oil-driven policy on climate change is damaging the world and destroying our image as a good country. We’re supposed to be the nice guys, who try to do the right thing in the world.

The vast majority of Canadians are hopping mad on this issue — we can win this. We just need to show Harper how serious we are that he change course. Sign up now and forward this email to everyone you know – we’ve got just 3 days to hit 25,000 signatures!

With much respect and hope,

Ricken Patel,
Avaaz.org

PS – Here are links to some more info on this:

David Suzuki (the Nature of Things) calls the government’s spin on climate change “humiliating” and “ludicrous”
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/283829

The former editor-in-chief of CBC news discusses the damage done by Canada’s climate policy to our international reputation:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_burman/2007/12/canada_flounders_on_issue_of_c.html

The Fossil of the Day Award site:
http://www.avaaz.org/fossils

LOVE truly is the answer my friends

This is an article I wrote. The ‘beautiful game’ refers to soccer:

If the majority of scientists and economists are correct in their analysis of global warming trends, the planet is facing a significant environmental and socio-economic crisis in the years to come. If what we are told is true, we have a very short window of opportunity (scientists estimate 10 – 20 years) in which to eliminate our bad habits in order to save the planet. We have a purpose; we are, and I say this very humbly, the most important generation to walk the planet. Think of ten years over the course of human history: It is merely a momentary blip; a blink of an eye over the course of a cosmic millennium. And you and I, for whatever reason, are alive and breathing during this most precious and scary and exhilarating of times. The way our generation conducts business as well as the way our generation conducts our own individual lives is integral to the success or the demise of the planet. Still don’t think you have a purpose?

What Is Progress?

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it.
Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

http://www.monbiot.com/ 

Posted December 4, 2007

The numbers show that this should be the real question at the Bali talks.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th December 2007

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist. Let me show you why.

There is now a broad scientific consensus that we need to prevent temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above their pre-industrial level. Beyond that point, the Greenland ice sheet could go into irreversible meltdown, some ecosystems collapse, billions suffer from water stress, droughts could start to threaten global food supplies(1,2).

The government proposes to cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This target is based on a report published in 2000(3). That report was based on an assessment published in 1995, which drew on scientific papers published a few years earlier. The UK’s policy, in other words, is based on papers some 15 years old. Our target, which is one of the toughest on earth, bears no relation to current science.

Over the past fortnight, both Gordon Brown and his adviser Sir Nicholas Stern have proposed raising the cut to 80%(4,5). Where did this figure come from? The last G8 summit adopted the aim of a global cut of 50% by 2050, which means that 80% would be roughly the UK’s fair share. But the G8’s target isn’t based on current science either.

In the new summary published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you will find a table which links different cuts to likely temperatures(6). To prevent global warming from eventually exceeding 2°, it suggests, by 2050 the world needs to cut its emissions to roughly 15% of the volume in 2000.

I looked up the global figures for carbon dioxide production in 2000(7) and divided it by the current population(8). This gives a baseline figure of 3.58 tonnes of CO2 per person. An 85% cut means that (if the population remains constant) the global output per head should be reduced to 0.537t by 2050. The UK currently produces 9.6 tonnes per head and the US 23.6t(9,10). Reducing these figures to 0.537t means a 94.4% cut in the UK and a 97.7% cut in the US. But the world population will rise in the same period. If we assume a population of 9bn in 2050(11), the cuts rise to 95.9% in the UK and 98.3% in the US.

The IPCC figures might also be out of date. In a footnote beneath the table, the panel admits that “emission reductions … might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks”. What this means is that the impact of the biosphere’s response to global warming has not been fully considered. As seawater warms, for example, it releases carbon dioxide. As soil bacteria heat up, they respire more, generating more CO2. As temperatures rise, tropical forests die back, releasing the carbon they contain. These are examples of positive feedbacks. A recent paper (all the references are on my website) estimates that feedbacks account for about 18% of global warming(12). They are likely to intensify.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters finds that even with a 90% global cut by 2050, the 2° threshold “is eventually broken”(13). To stabilise temperatures at 1.5° above the pre-industrial level requires a global cut of 100%. The diplomats who started talks in Bali yesterday should be discussing the complete decarbonisation of the global economy.

It is not impossible. In a previous article I showed how by switching the whole economy over to the use of electricity and by deploying the latest thinking on regional supergrids, grid balancing and energy storage, you could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power(14). The major exception is flying (don’t expect to see battery-powered jetliners) which suggests that we should be closing rather than opening runways.

The World Social Forum: Charter of Prinicples

The committee of Brazilian organizations that conceived of and organized the first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to 30th, 2001, after evaluating the results of that Forum and the expectations it raised, consider it necessary and legitimate to draw up a Charter of Principles to guide the continued pursuit of that initiative. While the principles contained in this Charter – to be respected by all those, who wish to take part in the process and to organize new editions of the World Social Forum – are a consolidation of the decisions that presided over the holding of the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the reach of those decisions and define orientations that flow from their logic.

1) The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth.

2) The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that “Another World Is Possible”, it becomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.

3) The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.

4) The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests, with the complicity of national governments. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens – men and women – of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples.

5) The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body representing world civil society.

6) The meetings of the World Social Forum do not deliberate on behalf of the World Social Forum as a body. No one, therefore, will be authorized, on behalf of any of the editions of the Forum, to express positions claiming to be those of all its participants. The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body, whether by vote or acclamation, on declarations or proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority, of them and that propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum as a body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings, nor does it intend to constitute the only option for interrelation and action by the organizations and movements that participate in it.

7) Nonetheless, organizations or groups of organizations that participate in the Forum’s meetings must be assured the right, during such meetings, to deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide on, whether singly or in coordination with other participants. The World Social Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions widely by the means at its disposal, without directing, hierarchizing, censuring or restricting them, but as deliberations of the organizations or groups of organizations that made the decisions.

The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international to build another world.

9) The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. Neither party representations nor military organizations shall participate in the Forum. Government leaders and members of legislatures who accept the commitments of this Charter may be invited to participate in a personal capacity.

10) The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence as a means of social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another.

11) As a forum for debate the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation of the results of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination, and on the alternatives proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions is creating internationally and within countries.

12) As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social Forum encourages understanding and mutual recognition amongst its participant organizations and movements, and places special value on the exchange among them, particularly on all that society is building to center economic activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and respecting nature, in the present and for future generations.

13) As a context for interrelations, the World Social Forum seeks to strengthen and create new national and international links among organizations and movements of society, that, in both public and private life, will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of de-humanization the world is undergoing and to the violence used by the State, and reinforce the humanizing measures being taken by the action of these movements and organizations.

14) The World Social Forum is a process that encourages its participant organizations and movements to situate their actions, from the local level to the national level and seeking active participation in international contexts, as issues of planetary citizenship, and to introduce onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are experimenting in building a new world in solidarity.

Approved and adopted in São Paulo, on April 9, 2001, by the organizations that make up the World Social Forum Organizing Committee, approved with modifications by the World Social Forum International Council on June 10, 2001.

USEFUL Links about World Social Forums:

http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/

http://www.wsf2008.net/

https://www.ussf2007.org/

Northwest social forum: the challenges:

http://students.washington.edu/atoft/wordpress/

World Social Forum 2008

Why a Global day of action and mobilisation?

From the Zapatist uprising in 1995 and the Seattle demonstrations in 1999, appeared a worldwide alliance of movements against neo-liberal globalisation, war, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and environmental disasters.

In first phase, this movement focused on big international mobilisations, such as Genoa against the G8 or Cancun against the WTO. The huge demonstrations against the war on Iraq, February 15th 2003 was the apogee of this phase.

During the last years the movements grew enormously,and was rooted in national struggles and local realities. Everywhere in the world, mobilisations appeared in different fields:student movements, workers issues, poverty and violence against the women, environment and climate change, indigenous people and migrants’ rights, etc.

The main challenge for all of us, today, is to link those locals and national struggles with the worldwide goals, to give more strengths to our struggles, alternatives and campaigns,to enlarge our alliances.
That’s the purpose of the 2008 Global Day of Action: act locally to change globally! Give visibility to our local struggles through a common day of action!

Why now, and why January 26th?

The idea of a global day of action is not new. In the last years, several attempts tried to set up a day of action which could become a reference for this new “movement of movements” in analogy with May 1st for the Labour movement or March 8th for Women’s day.

Since 2001, the Wold Social Forum has become the main space in which one all those movements meet and build alliances.

The World Social Forum is not an event. It is a process,which lives in the local, national, regional and thematic Forums, in the many and plural struggles, campaigns, alternatives for another world which are developing all over the planet.

The decision to hold the next WSF event in 2009,two years after the last one in Nairobi,helped the idea of a global worldwide mobilisation to emerge.

The date of 26th of January comes from the choice to organise the Global Day of Action in the same period of the Davos summit, to maintain the confrontation with this important neo-liberal gathering of the elites and let live the spirit of WSF which always took place at the end of January.

After the Global Day of Action 2008, an evaluation will be done in order to decide if we move the date for further mobilizations and events.