Writing on the Wall

Oxfam has recently put out a report to the UN High Comissioner on Human Rights, stating that Climate Change is a Justice and Human Rights issue, that needs to be dealt with within a justiciable framework.

Oxfam Press Release on their Report

I whole-heartedly agree with what they are saying, but when I read the report I am left with some questions in terms of the principles around which such a frame-work should be built.

Their report finally prompted me to get a piece I wrote a few months ago out into the public domain:

Why we need non-tradeable rights to basic goods in order to adapt to climate change.

New Orleans marked the end of the American half-century. Up till then it was possible to imagine the world run via an American-style of national and international governance. But with climate change in the news, it was suddenly clear that the American model was too flexible to deal adequately with a moderate-sized storm. How is such a model suitable for a world that faces the prospect of increasing environmental instability?

Rather, it is clear that in order to guarantee the social stability that is needed to deal with the upcoming environmental instability, then a social contract needs to be worked out globally based on an ethic of social protection, more in line with European Social-
Democratic models. However this social protection approach needs to be geared to the realities of the poor in developing countries.  They are not in the same situation as the labour movements were in the industrialising North, where such rights were fought for, and which were framed largely in terms of the workplace. So we need a new framework for social protection, one that is based in Southern Realities, where direct dependence on the environment is far more the norm.

If we merely continue with market mechanisms for fighting climate change (and all the other environmental crunches) we will find that the spending power of the rich will price the poor to starvation. Instead we need to extend the right to life to include the right to basic goods necessary for life, water and food being the most obvious examples to start with.

There are three main reasons why this measure is absolutely essential:

1)Inequality is still increasing in the world.
This means that the spending power of the rich increasingly outweighs that of the poor. The debates on the recent food crisis reveal this phenomenon for food, where the purchasing power of a citizen of the rich world, even if you only consider that which they will use to fill their petrol tank, outweighs the entire spending power that a poor person can put towards preventing their own or their family’s starvation. Thus land is allocated to the former, via bio-fuel production,  despite widespread starvation amongst the latter.

It is the same principle at work when dairy and meat production displaces the cultivation of basic staple crops.  Indeed this is a generalised problem with all basic resources. As more and more resources become integrated into global commodity markets, and as inequality continues to increase, this issue of economic competition for the basic necessities of life will continue. This is especially so as markets are liberalised, and the “distortions” of various forms of social protection are reduced or removed, as is happening in food and water markets in India.

2)Basic goods are running short.

As the demand for basic goods increases, as the global economy grows and as population grows (although this is far less significant than economic growth) and natural resource consumption follows suit, the supply of basic goods like land and water, which is finite, cannot keep up with demand. With this emerging shortage, prices rise, and these resources increasingly (via normal market mechanisms) become monopolised by those that can afford these increased prices.

These goods are not really substitutable, and intensification of their productive usage implies capital investment, and so an increase in prices in order to pay for that investment.The other route out of such a situation is to intensify productive usage (of both water and land) through increased labour intensity. The main way this can happen is by granting rights to land and water, or some form of land reform, since owners of larger plots of land tend to employ capital intensive rather than labour-intensive methods, whereas small-holders tend to get higher yields per land area, due to the quantity and quality of labour intensity they tend to invest in their land.

3)The poor are dependent on environmental stability for their welfare.
In India, figures put together by Development Economist Utsa Patnaik (1) indicate that more than 80% of people are below the income level required to meet the 2400 calories a day they require to be nourished. This means that many in India are starving, and those that are avoiding starvation are only doing so via direct non-cash livelihoods from nature. Since these non-cash livelihoods tend not to include irrigation, which involves capital investment, these livelihoods are strongly dependent on climatic and environmental conditions, as is indicated by the term “rain-fed agriculture.”

The situation in India is likely to be fairly representative of the rest of the world, since it has the world’s largest irrigation network, thus in other places people are likely to be more rather than less dependent on the environment and climate. The upshot of this is that climate change will directly de-stabilise one of the only remaining welfare safety
nets remaining in many parts of the poor-majority world.

A global safety-net
These three points converge towards the need for a form of global safety-net that is rights-based. The UN FAO has guidelines on the right to food, and there are discussions on the right to water and the right to development (which itself implies the first two.) But ultimately the three points above imply that there will be some sort of crunch on most forms of natural resource. Right now this includes oil, access to carbon sinks (which is what climate change turns on), land, fisheries and increasingly freshwater.

This implies the need for a set of basic rights for all these resources, similar to the basic rights called for under contraction and convergence (C&C): In the case of C&C, the global annual carbon sink is divided up and allocated to each person on earth, as a starting point for a system of rights and trading. But if we are facing a generalised resource crunch, and if climate change is likely to worsen this by destabilising the main welfare system for the poor globally (i.e. a predictable environment and climate) then surely we need to generalize such a system of rights, so that we have the basis for a global safety-net that is commensurate to the problem.

Within political philosophy there is a strand of work, represented by Hillel Steiner (2) that lays out the case for justice as based on each person on earth having a fundamental right to a share of the earth’s resources, as if we lived on “Earth plc”.  Such a line of reasoning is a sensible starting point for a framework of international welfare that can meet the coming challenges. The current model of aid, based on an allocation of much less than 1% of GDP on a “charity” basis leads to huge problems of lack of democratic accountability, and this perpetuate a huge skewing of power relations. This regime is clearly inadequate to deal with the current challenges of global poverty that we face, never mind those much greater ones which already lie within our current horizon.

Consider India
India is soon to become the world’s most populous nation, with the majority of its people with purchasing power below that which would allow them to meet international nutrition norms. It stands number 94 in the Global Hunger Index, just after Ethiopia, and yet this is the land that is “Shining India.” That is a country with a 9% growth rate, where the official poverty rate is 25% with the World Bank claiming that 100,000 people a day are being lifted out of poverty. (3)

But these poverty figures are based on highly suspect statistical methods, where a faulty price index is applied to prices in 1973, rather than looking at how much food a given income would buy today.  The reality, as documented by rural journalists, nutrition experts, and by the Development Economist Utsa Patanaik (4), is that poverty and malnutrition have been getting worse under liberalisation, since 1991. Liberalisation is leading to a collapse in purchasing power in Rural Areas, which is also why there has been an epidemic of farmer suicides in India during the same period.
Part of the reason that India’s situation is getting worse is that pre-liberalisation India had a fairly well-developed system of price support for farmers and food subsidy for the general population. This is being dismantled in the name of making the rural economy more efficient, but it seems that one of the inefficiencies that is being phased-out is providing basic resources to people who cannot pay their market price.  This in many ways resembles that market driven famine in Bengal documented by Amartya Sen. There is food available, indeed India has exported food during this period, but people cannot afford to pay for it, and making markets efficient only makes them better at driving this process.

There is a similar picture emerging with water, as Industrial usage of water and water pollution compete with the subsistence needs of the poor. This is partly facilitated by a privatisation program for India’s urban water facilities, and partly through a drive to clear away legal barriers to business in India, which includes India’s fairly stringent environmental laws.

These problems interlock: Tirapur is an industrial town in Tamil Nadu that is host to India’s first Public Private Partnership for water. Tirapur is one of India’s main textile producing centers, and it lets out phenomenal amounts of industrial waste-water. So much so that it proved too costly to include the processing of this wastewater in the partnership contract.  Hence the local water provider, now a private consortium, is not required to process this waste-water. At the same time, due to the economic value and prestige of the project for local politicians, the local pollution control boards refuses to pursue its legal powers in enforcing the proper implementation of industrial waste-water processing.

This form of corruption of legal process is not isolated to the district and state level, but also operates within the federal Supreme Court. Environmental Lawyers have described how under liberalisation Supreme Court Judges have radically changed their stance towards environmental law, overturning previous decisions, openly accusing environmental lawyers of being anti-development in court, and shouting them down and threatening them with contempt of court proceedings. This is in line with the policy drive by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to “streamline” the approval process for business investment processes.

What is disturbing about this is that India is dependent, more than any other country in the world, upon its irrigation network, in order to feed its ever growing population. Industrialisation uses up huge amounts of water: The EU uses twice as much water for industry as it does for agriculture. Thus there will be increasing competition between the expanding demands from industry and the needs of a growing, increasingly impoverished, rural  population.  If it is all left to market forces it is clear that the poor will be priced out of existence.

Hence it is clear that the only way for India to avoid a form of looming economic genocide, without even taking into account the effects of climate change, is to have a system of rights to basic goods. That such a system existed before and is now being dismantled by the dynamics of the international political economy, points to the need for such a rights regime to be global, so that such international forces can be brought within some sort of more democratic oversight, in order to safeguard the lives of the many.

Kyoto2 - Or who gets the permits?
The debate over Kyoto2 in no way undermines the case for environmental issues, such as climate change adaptation, being dealt with on a rights-based basis. The main questions raised by Kyoto2, as it contrasts with Contraction and Convergence, is how the permits for using natural resources should be distributed, especially in the case of industries with very concentrated usages of fossil fuels. The Kyoto2 proposals actually include Contraction and Convergence as a means of regulating diffused carbon sources.

Clearly many questions remain about how to implement the distribution of entitlements based on an allocation of environmental resource rights, but this in no way undermines the arguments for a fair system for the allocation of such rights. One of the problems of dealing with the upstream regulation of Carbon Sources is that it raises prices for all consumers. Since the poor use a greater share of of their income on basic goods like food and energy than the rich, this can be a regressive measure, so whilst efficient, it needs to be balanced by a system of basic rights and redistribution. This argument also applies to all taxation-based proposals. This approach provides a coherent basis for such a system to be set up internationally.
1 Utsa Patanaik lays out the figures and the arguments in detail here: The Republic of Hunger available at:
http://www.networkideas.org/featart/apr2004/Republic_Hunger.pdf

2 Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
3 9 Handbook of Water Resources in India: Development, Management, Strategies, p. 4 J. Briscoe, R.P.S.
Malik (Eds.) OUP: New Delhi
4 Patanaik, prev. cit.