Climate-Change Challenge for the Poor

Climate-Change Challenge for the Poor – Part II Unpredictable weather patterns, diversion of grain for biofuels, contribute to growing food shortages Mira Kamdar YaleGlobal, 28 September 2007 Food for energy: Climate change and increasing use of grain for biofuels will mean longer lines at soup kitchens around the globe NEW YORK: Thanks to the booming biofuels market, wacky weather and increased world demand, global grain stocks have fallen to a scant 57 days of consumption, their lowest level in 34 years. Prices are up sharply. International-aid organizations warn they will not have enough emergency food on hand to meet anticipated need. Even consumers in rich countries will have to pay significantly more for their food into 2008. This risks not only starvation and malnutrition among the world’s poor, but also social and political unrest. Governments with the means have nervously shored up national grain stocks. Panic buying by India, which floated tenders to import 50,000 tons of wheat with an option to buy an additional 50,000 tons earlier this year, was blamed for sending the price of wheat to almost double what it commanded just a year ago. The European Union is so concerned, it recently eliminated its 10 percent grain set-aside entirely, and the Organizaton for Economic Cooperation and Development has warned that governments should end subsidies for biofuels. There is reason for alarm. In recent decades when global grain stocks fell, the drop-off was temporary, the overall trend upward. That trend may be reversing. The weather has become increasingly unpredictable, making it hard for farmers to know when to plant or what will thrive. In 2007, producers faced a hot, dry spring followed either by more dry weather or an overly wet summer, depending on the region. In addition, the biofuels rush has tipped the fuel value of corn in the US above the food value of this staple; 16 percent of the US corn crop was diverted to ethanol production in 2007, and a full third is expected to go to producing ethanol in 2008. And a large sale of corn slated for human consumption redirected to animal feed instead by Cargill and Mexico’s Gruma, partly owned by Archer Daniels Midland Co., didn’t help. The price of tortillas in Mexico shot up 60 percent, sending angry citizens into the streets. Beyond Mexican tortillas, corn, as Michael Pollan so brilliantly points out in his recent book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” has become the basis of the American industrial and processed-food chain. Corn is now used to produce most of the meat, poultry, dairy and eggs as well as a host of processed foods and soft drinks that Americans consume every day. Plus, more people in booming India and China can afford to add animal protein to their traditional diets, further driving up world demand for corn. In addition to corn and wheat, the price of rice is rising. Even soybeans and pulses are more expensive than last year. The upward trend means the poor aren’t the only ones affected. The price of bread in the United Kingdom is up nearly a pound, or almost two dollars. The French, where high bread prices in 1789 provoked outright revolution, have been warned that they will have to pay more for their baguette. Italians look at pasta prices up 20 percent. In the US, people can expect to pay 10 percent more for chicken, 14 percent more for milk and 21 percent more for eggs. In Russia, the situation is dire: The price of bread is expected to be up 50 percent by the end of the year, cabbage up 30 percent, to name just two basic staples of the Russian diet. As if this wasn’t enough, a new report by William Cline of the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics offers a grim, country-by-country assessment of the impact of climate change on agriculture by the 2080s. Since most developing countries, where the bulk of the world’s poor live, happen to be located closer to the equator, they will be hit the hardest by crop damage related to climate change. Africa could see food production drop by as much as 28 percent; India's could fall by a whopping 38 percent, even as its population increases by another 400 million people. Richer countries will not be immune nor will potential gains in more temperate climes compensate for losses overall. On the whole, global food production is predicted to decline between 3 and 16 percent, even as another 3 billion people are added to the planet. Add to these alarming numbers the fact that world sea fisheries have already collapsed by one third and are predicted to be completely exhausted by the middle of the century. The future of food looks grim indeed. There are a few potentially positive variables. One is the possible impact of crops genetically engineered to withstand higher global temperatures. Another is the impact of so-called carbon fertilization, or of an atmosphere richer in the carbon plants love. Cline dismisses these as too speculative, arguing that it is dangerous to count on factors of unknown outcome to rescue us from otherwise certain food catastrophe. It’s no longer a matter of speculation: The era of cheap food is over. Increases in annual grain production have already fallen steadily off their Green-Revolution highs, declining from 2.8 percent in the 1960s and 1970s to 1.6 percent, during the past 25 years. While there will continue to be annual and regional fluctuations – India just announced it is holding off buying more grain in light of a bumper wheat harvest, causing prices to ease slightly – the year 2007 may represent a watershed moment in human food security, when the world tilted definitively away from growing abundance toward scarcity. Humanity has only itself to blame for this catastrophe, with the poor, as usual, paying more dearly than the rich. In addition to climate change, a finger can be pointed at rising consumption through population growth and changing food habits, environmental degradation including topsoil loss, acute water shortages, over-fishing, and the loss of agricultural land to urbanization and industrialization. Add to this the massive subsidies in the US and Europe that adversely affect food prices and production in developing countries, destroying the food-producing capacity of family farms around the world, and policies that have favored the development of monoculture-based industrial agriculture, entirely dependent on infusions of carbon-based synthetic fertilizers by the ton – and the world confronts the makings of a “perfect storm” of catastrophic food shortage. If ever there was a time to take extremely seriously ever-louder alarm bells about climate change, it is now. Human activity as it is currently taking place is clearly not sustainable. Where is the leadership that will put into immediate effect an international emergency-response plan to cut carbon production dramatically, with the utmost speed possible, and to assist India and China with finding alternative energy to fuel their rapid development? Where is the leadership that can break the stranglehold over global agriculture of carbon-addicted monopoly agribusiness and put humanity on a path to sustainable food security? Where is the leadership with the spine to tell the people of the rich world that they can no longer afford to pursue a lifestyle of wanton consumption and pollution for which people in the developing world have to make the ultimate sacrifice? In the prophetic words of Mahatma Gandhi, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.” At this rate, we will consume ourselves to death. Mira Kamdar, an associate fellow of the Asia Society and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute based in New York, is the author of "Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America & the World," published by Scribner in 2007. Click here for an excerpt of the book. Climate-Change Challenge for the Poor – Part I All nations have a responsibility to strive for lifestyles that are sustainable Chandrashekhar Dasgupta YaleGlobal, 26 September 2007 Waterworld: Indian villager paddles past a home, one of hundreds of thousands flooded, signaling the calamity that global climate change may bring NEW DELHI: In the recent months, torrential rains and floods have taken a heavy toll of lives and rendered homeless tens of thousands of families in rural India. This is not climate change but the onset of a benign monsoon, the answer to the prayers of a billion Indians. However, human suffering on such a scale raises an important question for all those concerned about climate change: If a developing country is so vulnerable even to normal seasonal variations, how will it cope with the impacts of climate change – floods and droughts, sea level rise, changes in rainfall patterns, cyclones or typhoons? Most people in developing countries eke out a living as subsistence farmers. They are far more vulnerable to changes in temperature and rainfall patterns than city dwellers engaged in industry or commerce. Unlike farmers in countries well endowed with financial and technological resources, peasants in developing countries will find it difficult to adapt to climate change by switching over, say, to new drought-resistant seeds or crops, efficient but expensive water-conservation technologies such as drip irrigation or simply shifting to new urban occupations. Low-income countries do not have adequate resources for building the housing and other physical infrastructure needed to afford protection against floods or cyclones. The world’s poor will be the principal victims of climate change. For the poorer countries, accelerated economic and social development holds out the only hope of adapting to climate change with any degree of success. Without rapid economic growth, they will lack the financial resources required for adaptation. Without rapid social development in fields such as education and public health, their workforce will continue to be deficient in the skills and mobility required for adaptation to climate change. Accelerated development is the key to successful adaptation in the South. The prospects of future generations will be seriously jeopardized if the present generation in developing countries fails to achieve rapid growth. For poorer countries, sustainable development is synonymous with accelerated development. Yet, affluent countries press the poor to accept a very different approach. They urge the developing countries to strike a “balance” between development and climate-change mitigation. Their argument is that the industrialized countries are unable, or unwilling, to reduce their own greenhouse-gas emissions on the scale required for limiting climate change within a certain range. Therefore, according to this line of reasoning, developing countries should curb their rising greenhouse-gas emissions, even at the cost of slowing down development. The proposal fails to meet the tests of efficiency as well as equity. By slowing development, the proposal would undermine the efforts of poorer countries to build up a capacity to adapt to climate change. It would increase the vulnerability of developing countries to the impacts of climate change. It is thus a deeply flawed response to climate change. Nor would it bring new benefits in respect of mitigation. No one questions the desirability of moderating emissions originating in developing countries. The real question is, who pays for it? Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the countries listed in Annex II – broadly corresponding to members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – are required to meet the incremental costs of mitigation measures in developing countries. The proposal now advocated by these countries would shift all or, at least, part of the incremental costs to the shoulders of the developing countries. This proposal does not expand the scope for mitigation measures in developing countries; it simply shifts the financial burden from affluent countries to poorer countries. In the process, it increases the vulnerability of future generations in developing countries. This brings us to the question of equity. Climate change is caused not by emissions of greenhouse gases as such but by excessively high emissions of these gases. Indeed, the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is essential for life on our planet. Human activities have generated greenhouse-gas emissions at least since the discovery of fire, but these did not interfere with the climate system until recent centuries. It was only after the advent of the Industrial Revolution that the ever-increasing combustion of hydrocarbon fuels – coal, petroleum and natural gas – caused emissions and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to exceed limits compatible with a stable climate. The industrialized countries are responsible, historically and currently, for the excessive atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations. Each inhabitant of our planet has an equal right to the atmosphere, but the industrialized countries have grossly exceeded their fair share. Annual per capita carbon-dioxide emissions are around 20 tons in the United States, 8.5 tons in the European Union and only 1 ton in India. If all countries had the same per capita emissions as India, climate change would not have occurred. Apart from being responsible for climate change, the industrialized countries also possess the financial and technological resources required for a global response. Their capabilities are much greater than those of developing countries. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is based on the principle of equity, reflecting the “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” of the industrialized and developing countries. The former are required to stabilize and reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. The latter are exempt from this requirement, and the convention specifically states that “per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and … the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs.” Most OECD countries also have a commitment under the convention to transfer financial resources and technology to developing countries to cover the incremental costs of mitigation measures implemented by the latter. This does not mean that the developing countries have no mitigation commitments under the UN Framework Convention or its Kyoto Protocol. Both accords incorporate a set of common commitments applicable to industrialized as well as developing countries. These include an obligation to “formulate and implement… programs containing measures to mitigate climate change.” Developing countries are expected to implement measures that do not involve incremental costs, i.e., measures yielding mitigation co-benefits, though they are primarily designed to promote national development priorities. Developing countries are not required to take measures involving incremental costs, unless the industrialized countries meet these additional costs. Any future agreement on climate change must fully conform to the framework convention, which correctly reflects the relationship between climate change and sustainable development. This relationship may be summed up in three propositions: ● For poorer countries, sustainable development means accelerated development. Slower growth rates would condemn future generations in these countries to face the impacts of global warming without significant adaptive capabilities. ● To make their fair contribution to climate-change mitigation, developing countries should adopt all feasible measures delivering mitigation co-benefits at no additional cost. There is considerable scope for win-win initiatives involving no diversion of resources from development priorities. Developing countries should also seek opportunities for implementing more ambitious mitigation measures if industrialized countries are prepared to meet the additional costs. ● In view of their responsibility for causing climate change as well as their financial and technological capabilities, industrialized countries should sharply reduce their own emissions and provide necessary financial and technological support for mitigation measures in developing countries. Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta led the Indian delegation in the negotiations for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi.