Hi Harry
>Thanks for those references Keith, they will be very useful.
You're most welcome, I'm glad you can use them.
>produce enough food to go around. Until I observe a change in the way
>wealth, and food, are distributed I must insist that we do all we can to
>increase the total production of food and services to humans. When so many
Well, you see, the last time this came up, quite recently (it comes
up every so often), I caused a furore by saying that hungry people
don't starve because of a shortage of food but because of an
inequitable economic system. It's all in the message archives, quite
interesting. So this time I thought I'd refrain. :-)
Of course I agree with you, but I think increasing production has got
a bad record. Too often it's tended to increase the rich-poor gap,
exclude the poor even further, and cause yet more environmental
degradation. The Green Revolution is a classic case, though far from
the only one. It "helped" all the wrong people.
It might make more sense instead to remove some of the constraints on
production at the small farms level. These programs always purport to
be helping small farmers, yet they invariably have a minimum size
cut-off point, confining the assistance to big farmers.
"Trickle-down" will do the rest, we're told. Removing such
constraints often means confronting the inequities which hold these
people down and which are the real cause of their parlous situation,
not any lack of productive capability. There are plenty of success
stories along these lines, but you don't hear of them much.
>I am in an unstable phase in regards to my position on Ecological
>Sustainability and population.
That sounds healthy! It's no place for comfortable certitudes.
>If we are in fact in denial and
>consequentially get it wrong we and the rest of biodiversity may only
>survive in pockets, despite what WE do the poor may destroy the biosphere in
>THEIR attempt to survive. Even the references you gave in regards to food
>production (and they are amongst the best) leave an after taste of closure,
>of hope rather than reason.
I think they're quite positive, really. They're activists and
campaigners, quite effective. They don't see it as hopeless. Nor do
I.
>The food import figures you quote may indicate
>the capacity of the populations concerned to pay for imports including food
>and I'm sure that you are aware of this aspect, indeed that is my real
>concern. If we were right why did we go to such convolutions to justify our
>position.
Various prime growing areas in Third World countries, together
totalling an area five times the size of Holland, are devoted to
growing cattle feed for Dutch cattle, at preferential rates. They
should be growing food for their own people, or at least commodities
they got a fair price for or could add their own value to. The Dutch
turn it into various surpluses - beef mountains, dairy lakes. And use
a lot of their own land to grow tulips, which they get a good price
for. And of course their farmers are subsidized. I'm not picking on
the Dutch. It's not an isolated case, just the one that springs to
mind.
Doesn't have much to do with feeding people, does it?
Market forces inevitably move money, commodities, goods, resources,
towards those with surplus resources, away from those with inadequate
resources. The winds of "free" trade favour the ships with the big
sails. A truly free market would require a lot of regulation and
intervention, rather than less and less, the recipe currently
promoted with increasing success by the "free" marketeers (read
"corporate interests"). We are rewarded for our silence and inaction
via enhanced opportunities for conspicuous consumption. Growing
numbers are rejecting this with increasing vehemence.
>One could argue that the world never was sustainable simply because
>starvation related disease always existed. As it stands the fat or greedy
>fail to leave enough to feed the poor and that means that the world does NOT
>produce enough food to go around.
It does, but for the fat and greedy. So which is the better solution,
to produce more food or rein in the fat and greedy? Greed knows no
limits, is never satisfied.
There have been many traditional societies and traditional systems
which proved sustainable, some still are.
>Until I observe a change in the way
>wealth, and food, are distributed I must insist that we do all we can to
>increase the total production of food and services to humans. When so many
>depend on the scraps from a rich man's table the apparent solution is more
>food for the rich resulting in more scraps for the poor.
But it doesn't work that way. The position of the poor doesn't
improve via some sort of upward suction effect, it gets worse. The
gap widens.
>We are attempting
>to reduce our waste and effective consumption by recycling, while we are at
>it we reduce our environmental impact. These are good things. We should,
>though, take care that cleaner production at the farm level results in
>productivity gains per hectare not losses or increased cost.
Those are not incompatible goals. And green energy fits well into
that scenario, especially at the local level.
>For political
>purposes we may talk of reducing environmental costs and even put a dollar
>value on environmental gain, in reality it has no dollar value unless you
>can collect it and distribute it to the needy. In Australia at least there
>has been a steady move away from the spirit of the Rio Declaration, so much
>so that the official definition of Ecological Sustainability lacks any
>reference to poverty or social equity. Many environmental projects have and
>are causing economic distress to the growing ranks of Australia's poor. The
>reaction will not be good, either the community will rebel or the social and
>economic divide will widen, either way the environment will loose. I hope
>that the Earth Summit 2002 may be the watershed, certainly some of the
>concerns expressed by commissioners as they prepare indicate that I am not
>alone in my misgivings.
Far from alone, IMHO. Agenda 21 did a lot of good. It set some new
standards, it put the precautionary principle on a new footing, it
turned attention towards traditional systems, and more, and a lot was
accomplished at ground level. But any good that came of it was due to
the many people and organisations at all levels that put their hearts
into it after Rio, or all we'd've had would have been an exalted form
of hot air. Earth Summit 2002 will probably be similar. Indeed it's
time for a watershed, and I'm also hoping it will be one. But that's
up to us, not just to "them".
>It may be that the haves are not willing to share.
>If that is the case, the have-nots can hardly be expected to contribute to
>an improvement in our quality of life.
>On this forum we work at the practical end of sustainability and maybe
>that's our share but sometimes the practical people need to moderate the
>ideologues.
Agree. I suppose I'll be accused of being such an ideologue, but I
don't really have an ideology, other than that injustice is wrong.
Where I stand comes from many years' working as an independent
journalist in the Third World and in the developed countries.
>Humans have got it terribly wrong before but imagine a mass
>extinction of species caused by a resource/human population crisis
>precipitated by environmental idealists who seemed to think that the poor
>would gracefully depart. How embarrassing!
It's the fat and greedy who're required to depart, or at least
desist, whether gracefully or not is up to them. The beginnings of
such a mass extinction are with us now, but the main cause is
unbridled resource exploitation. Beyond that, environmental
degradation is both a cause and an effect of poverty.
>A quote from Indira Gandhi:
>" We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further, and yet we
>cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people.
>Aren't poverty and need the greatest polluters? How can we speak to those
>who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans and rivers and
>air clean when their own lives are contaminated at the source? The
>environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty. Nor can poverty be
>eradicated without the use of science and technology."
The last two sentences are true enough. The application of science
and technology to poverty eradication also doesn't have a good
record, but many valuable lessons have been learnt. Yet these only
address the symptoms of poverty, not the direct cause. If you look at
it that way, Indira Gandhi was much more representative of the
problem than the solution.
The recent crisis over public transport and airpollution in Delhi is
best understood against a backdrop of long official neglect and
incompetence, fuelled by corruption (and thus corrupters). Who are
"the greatest polluters" in that scenario? And so many others.
The annual forest fires in Indonesia which shroud South East Asia in
haze are blamed on peasant farmers, but by far the major cause is
corrupt timber companies and corrupt officials. The farmers
("marginalised" landless peasants for the most part) follow the
loggers. Same scenario. Etc. etc.
> Any assistance with this moral dilemma appreciated. Regards from Harry
Yeah. It has to be wrestled with, no easy solutions, eh? But we're
going to get slagged any moment for being off-topic and "let's get
back to talking about biofuels". Not that I care. It is about
biofuels. What's the point of biofuels without this context? So, as
you say, if we comfortably neglect these issues because they're
"off-topic" and it turns out we were wrong all along and biofuels are
not sustainable and our promoting them is killing people elsewhere,
it's none of our concern?
Regards
Keith Addison
Journey to Forever
Handmade Projects
Tokyo
http://journeytoforever.org/
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
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