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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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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Johnathon Freedland, one of the few journalists out there with a good grip on global goings on, calls for optimism for lefties worldwide, in the face of a drubbing in Europe:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Dont be fooled by Europes mood. Globally, the left is reawakening

My comment was that the need for left wing thought globally is certainly there:

There is an obvious risk of revolution world wide. When people have nothing to lose they will take to the streets. If global warming goes above 2 degress there is a good chance of poor people starving all over the world due to a hike in food prices. This trend is already emerging with biofuels.

The left’s big problem has been one of scale: Corporations have gone international, but Unions, and politics have not, hence Blair’s surrender to globalisation.

But social problems are global too, and that is catching up on us. It is currently only the left that is campaigning for a global politics to reign in this ludicrous inequality, and so provide support to the weaker parts.

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There is a very interesting article on Open Democracy, where bean counters have looked at various forms of assymetric warfare (between state and non-state actors, with radicaly different levels of power and resources) and, from the way they have gathered and treated their data set (caveat emptor), they have found that non-violent revolution is more effective:

Madrid11.net | Does terrorism work?

This is pleasing to me, considering the bashing I took for making a stand against violent methods as the best way for the Palestinians to respond to Isreali occupation and ethnic cleansing.

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It seems that Cheap Flights are Proliferating around the world:

Branson has plans to open up routes to Asia

Whilst low fare airlines enjoy huge growth in across Asia

In the UK Sian Berry Bemoans the way ministers are incoherant over flying

Blair effectively says keep on flying to everyone

Whilst Plane Stupid point out that all this is, well, ridiculous, and not really helping things very much.

It seems that everyone is pointing at each other. Blair says that the Chinese will make up for any British cuts in emmissions in a couple of years, whilst India and China point out that their per-capita emmissions are much lower than for OECD countries, and that their people surely want a taste of the pie.

There is a big debate about environmental justice underlying this (how much of the world’s resources does each person get to use?)
So when are we going to see a global convention that limits aviation? Aviation is not a part of Kyoto. The EU emmissions trading scheme does not seem to limit flying very strongly (the Plane Stupid people make that pretty clear.)

So the question is, where is the binding global agreement to limit aviation going to come from?

New Statesman - The economics of conquest

New Year’s Resolutions for the world:1) Elected Global Representatives: So that the UN has a direct mandate from “we the people”2) Global Public Service Broadcasting, so that “we the people” have a meaningful forum for democratic debate at a global level3) Taxation on the global commons (most pressingly the atmosphere, but the seas, space, the internet, and knowledge / patents, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum come to mind, as does biodiversity exploitation) to fund this global shebang.

4) The ICC given powers to prosecute people who break international law, even if they are leaders of G8 countries.

5) Oh yes and stop televising state sponsored murders, it’s too depressing.

Richest 2 Percent Own Half the World’s Wealth - Yahoo! News

If the richest 2% own half the world’s wealth, and half the worlds population share less than 1% of the worlds wealth, how can economists and policy makers avoid dealing with equality as a social good?

Well one answer is to concentrate on absolute rather than relative poverty. If enough wealth can keep on being drawn into the economy, then surely it does not matter how rich the rich are, as long as the poor are getting better off?

But this is not a realistic proposition. You just have to look at the sources of wealth to see that this approach is running out of steam, since there is only so much new wealth you can draw into the world economy.

You can extract wealth from nature, but the current global environmental crisis suggests that we cannot keep expanding how much we do that forever. As that source of wealth dries up we have to start thinking about making better use of what we have, which partly means sharing it out more equally.

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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Ahdaf Soueif: A project of dispossession can never be a noble cause

This is the kind of thinking on the Israel-Palestine question I would support, alongside people like Said, who never rolled over to the Isrealis, but also never lost sight of the need for a solution.

One of the key issues of defining democracy at a global level is trying to understand what we mean by ‘public’ on what is effectively a new and emerging scale for debate. For democracy to operate we need to have ways for the ‘public’ to define themselves as a body at this level, and for ‘public’ opinion to be expressed and debated. There is no polity without a population or community that is to be defined in relation it. This leads us to ask not only what sort of polity are we hoping to constitute, and around which kinds of principles and institutions, but also how are the relationships with populations to be built up within this?

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Constitutions and revolutions are born out of discussion. A blog seems like a good salon for discussing a global constitution. But where should we start?

There has been quite some debate on such issues recently, much of it can be seen on the website Open Democracy. For instance, George Monbiot

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/George_Monbiot.jsp

and David Held
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/David_Held.jsp

have both put forward their ideas there.

What do we mean by ‘humanity’?
However both of their approaches seem to me to need a stronger initial focus, or philosophical starting point. They both seem to hinge around an emerging ‘human’ identity, born of a globalising moment, some sense of cosmopolitanism.

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