Incredibly important case. Check out Vandana Shiva’s “Biopiracy” for the devastating impact of seed terminator technologies on farmers in the developing world.
Month: February 2013
The new imperialism = commodifying the global commons
Carbon offset plantations have already displaced many people in the global South. Now GE trees pose an additional threat. They are a terrible idea, an example of accumulation by dispossession that must be stopped!
The price of carbon on global markets has crashed to hitherto unsurpassed lows in recent weeks. There were many problems inherent in carbon markets from the outset, but these problems have become glaringly obvious as time goes on. It’s long past time to scrap this approach to dealing with climate change.
An excellent account of the crisis of the most advanced attempt to commodify emissions – the European Emissions Trading System – can be found here.
In general, we need a new approach to dealing with the major environmental crises of our times. Green capitalism is failing us on a number of different fronts. Organizations such as Via Campesina have long been arguing for local, decentralized systems of power generation and agriculture as alternatives to the feckless, destructive energy regime under which we now live. These alternatives are even more important to foreground now, before major polluting nations such as the US sign on to their versions of emissions trading.
After Hurricane Sandy, the world is suddenly far more aware of the threats faced by major cities as a result of climate chaos. A just released report details the cities most threatened by rising oceans. Another piece lists the cities most threatened in terms of the billions of dollars of damage likely to be inflicted.
Such measures of potential damage tend to ignore the differences within vulnerable city populations, and, even worse, to ignore cities such as Dhaka and Dakar, where many millions of people face inundation but where billions of dollars of capital investment are not necessarily at stake.
GM agriculture is breeding Frankstenpests and -weeds.
Last year in Durban at the Climate Change counter-summit I met a group of women from Tibet who were warning of the environmental and social devastation likely to be caused by expansion of dams on the rivers flowing off the Tibetan plateau (not to mention rising geo-strategic tensions between India and China linked to exploitation of these waters). For more info, check out http://www.tibet3rdpole.org/
Key riposte to the intensification of corporate agribusiness.