Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.
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The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
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Food is something we can no longer take for granted. The recent forth IPPC report on climate change, as well as pressure on land use from Bio-fuels, increased meat consumption and a growing freshwater crisis all point towards ongoing problems with food supply to the poor. Add to this the rising cost of oil, and the pressure on the price of oil-based inputs to agriculture, like most pesticides and fertilizers, and you can see that we need to think carefully about how to stabilize food supply, as well as protect farmers from price shocks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…
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For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

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Graham Thompson writes about neo-liberalism off the back of a conference at SOAS on corporate social responsibility. However, whilst articulating that neo-liberalism has moral content, he does not go very far in exploring the implications of that morality:

Responsibility and neo-liberalism | openDemocracy

My commentary was as follows:

Thompson argues coherently that neo-liberalism has become internalised into a form of governmentality, where a certain kind of personal responsibility works hand in hand with the outer forms of governance.

However it is important to remember that this internalisation of responsibility is neither new, nor unique to neo-liberalism, and that what are significant are the specific forms these internalisations take.

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There is a fascinating tale of free TV’s in Tamile Nadu that needs further follow up, that I stuck up on the prospect blog. Please do go comment, its a little slow right now:
Free TVs in Tamil Nadu

The Reith Lectures this year are given by Sachs. He’s an economist, and an American, but he actually seems sensible: He is having a good go at putting a picture together.

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 Summary

Also, the BBC seems to be wising up about open source and is offering the lectures as an MP3 podcast. You can even subscribe via iTunes!

Looks like parts of the mainstream are actually starting to wake up to what is going on.

Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering

What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor.

When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food.

This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse.

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The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return

The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.

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