Resilient People Resilient Planet - Another report not worth reading

"Now more than ever, leaders need to focus on what matters most - the long-term resilience of people and the planet - the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability urged in its report presented today to UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon in Addis Ababa. The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma. The Panel’s final report, “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing,” contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible."

This is how the press release for the launch of the report of the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability present it. Unfortunately, the report doesn't really say almost anything how sustainable development can be mainstreamed into economic policy, and even less how it can be mainstreamed in the actions of economic agents, i.e. investors,  companies, workers and consumers.

There are multiple layers of problems here. The first layer is that very little has happened since the Rio conference 1992.

"A quarter of a century ago, the Brundtland report introduced the concept of sustainable development to the international community as a new paradigm for economic growth (my emphasis), social equality and environmental sustainability. The report argued that sustainable development could be achieved by an integrated policy framework embracing all three of those pillars. The Brundtland report was right then, and it remains right today. The problem is that, 25 years later, sustainable development remains a generally agreed concept, rather than a day-to-day, on-the-ground, practical reality."

The second layer is that as you can see above, economic growth was seen not only as possible but actually as a part of, a precondition for sustainable development. So one of the main expression of unsustainable development (an uncontrolled growth) is seen as a condition for it.

And the third layer is that the underlying analysis is flawed. Neither the Bruntland report nor this report has understood that it is the underlying economic drivers that destroys the environment and creates poverty (read for instance my posts Poverty, Property and Profit and Beyond Sustainability). Well, they do admit it to some extent, but they believe those things can be fixed by tweaking the system rather than changing the system. So we should have more green consumerism (recommendation 11); we should develop new indexes for measuring progress, over and above the GDP (recommendation 39), better sustainability reporting from companies (recommendation 32).

The report is full of language that makes the weak recommendations even weaker, expressions such as "explore a range of measures", "step up their efforts", and the "Panel calls for a process to explore the concept and application of the critical issue of equity in relation to sustainable development". The reports is full of jargon and wishy-washy language such as "Governments should use public investment to create enabling frameworks that catalyse very substantial additional financing"(recommendation 36).

When it comes the what really counts, how economic agents ACT, the reports is very weak: businesses "should seek to align their business practices with universally accepted principles concerning human rights, labour, environmental sustainability and the fight against corruption" "should seek" to align is far from "must", or "shall" or even from "should", and, of course there are really very few measures suggested leading in this direction.

In general, even if the report itself says: "to achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required.  Tinkering at the edges will not do the job.", this is where the report really falls short. It does call for and end of subsidies for fossil fuel and it does call for increased internalisation of costs, and it calls for some regulation, but it is still only on the level of tinkering, in the same way as the other major UN effort towards Rio, the Green Economy report.

Greenpeace writes the following

"Its mandate was clearly recognized: “efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other social and economic targets are hampered by the inability to agree on decisive and coordinated action in national and multilateral fora.”  Yet in the end the politicians did what they always do – they kicked the tough issues down the road for someone else to deal with and bowed to what they thought could get agreed.  No wonder there’s a leadership vacuum."

Fusion, to big to fail?

I have pointed before to the Do the Math blog (not for lazy people wanting one-liners). In Tom Murphy's latest post he express doubts about nuclear fusion:

No one can truly say whether we will achieve fusion in a way that is commercially practical. If teams of PhDs have spent over 60 years wailing on the problem while spending tens of billions of dollars, I think it’s safe to use our fusion quest as the definition of hard. It’s a much larger challenge than sending men to the Moon. We have no historical precedent for an arduous technological problem on this scale that ultimately succeeded to become a ho-hum commercial reality. But for that matter, I don’t think we have any precedent for something on this scale that has failed. In short, we’re out of our depths and can’t be cocky about predictions in either direction.

I certainly remember fusion being presented as the future energy source already as a child. I remember Swedish scientist Hannes Alvén's groundbreaking research to make "magnetic bottles" to contain nuclear fusion, as I was a technological optimist as a child of the Moon landing age.I don't really believe much in fusion these days.


I don't know, and can't judge if failure of a fusion plant is potentially as lethal or even worse than a failure of a fission reactor, but I am told fusion should be less dangerous. I guess we will not know for sure until it is a bit too late. I certainly believe that it will be very difficult to ever get fusion to work. And even if it could work, the development of technologies like that are based on an assumption of eternal stability of society, and an eternal complex society which can afford to allocate resources to enormous investments and research for eons of time. And security. And stability. Nuclear power and fusion pre-suppose eternal stability of society which - unfortunately - is utterly ahistorical. There will be chaos, there will be Gaddafis and Osamas, there will be social unrest. As one commenter to Tom's post says: "Sometimes overwhelming complexity is mother nature’s way of saying you’re going down the wrong path."

These kinds of technologies are fueled by big government spending and ambitious researchers. Two secondary, but still serious problems with it are that it divert resources and brilliant brains from more promising and simpler solutions, and that it keeps people dreaming that we will find another bag full of candy, similar like the fossil fuel boon, that allowed us to, seemingly, detach from natural boundaries.

And even if it could work, which I don't think it will, and even if it would be a very efficient and cheap source of energy, which is much less sure (the costs for this is very high, and energy efficiency is extremely low so far), I don't think humanity will benefit much from another candy bag. Cheap energy is the prime driver to exhaust all other resources. We don't need more of that, as little as we need more sugar or fat in our diet. And yes, those two things are related, but that is the subject for another post.

From hunter and gatherers to global capitalism and thereafter

Fossil fuel allowed us to expand beyond the boundaries of location, but it doesn’t and will not allow us to expand beyond the boundaries of the planet. Capitalism and global markets force us to compete with everyone, to constantly produce more, to constantly grow. Fossil fuel and capitalism has formed a very strong couple, fortified by human values expressed as individualism and consumerism. “Capitalism” as a socio-economic system is harmful and does more bad than good.

There is no more natural capital to freely exploit, and the returns on extracting resources from nature are dwindling. Also social capital is decreasing as a result of the values of capitalism. The path ahead is to only use what can constantly be generated and regenerated from nature. We need to strengthen those institutions and values that build social coherence. Those are community action, civil society and cooperation instead of competition. We will have markets and we will need a state also in the future, but the relative importance of those institutions need to be radically tilted.

I believe those two paragraphs in the most succinct way explain what my book  
Garden Earth, from hunter and gatherers to global capitalism and thereafter,
is about. I sent the manuscript to proof-reading today.

No to rubber?

I wonder when international NGOs will launch a boycott against condoms or rubber boots.....When you see the large scale land grabbing taking place for rubber plantations in the forest areas of Laos, you wonder a bit why oil palm and soya are bad and not rubber. There is apparently a global rubber boom that I wasn't aware of.

A recently established rubber plantation along the road between Vientiane and Vang Vieng

" Rubber production generates income for the Laotian state in the form of lease fees and taxes, albeit not as much as possible. For the rural population, it brings roads and thus better access to markets, but frequently costs them their land and thus their livelihood, and causes damage to the environment".read more

Organic agriculture: time to look ahead

In a recent posting I explained that for a company, the added value of having a certified product is much less if certification is ‘normal’. And the same is true for consumers; we are more likely to buy a product based on a label if it is exclusive to the product rather than being the norm. The more products in the same category that carries the mark, the less interesting the mark becomes as a differentiating tool, and it will move from the front to the back of the product, before it ultimately disappears.   

What does all this matter? It matters a lot to the future of the model of a separate organic market, based on premium prices and a set of standards, conformity assessment and a label, which is the main development model for the organic sector. The sector spends a great deal of energy discussing minute details in the standards and control system, often with the illusion that there is one standard or one certain control measure that is “right”. But what is “right” must be seen in relationship to what the system is supposed to accomplish, who it serves, what are the parameters for success? Very few organisations engaged in the Organic Guarantee System have a clear vision of where they want to be ten years ahead: many are just stewards of a system developed thirty years ago with little reflection of where it is heading.

‘Development’ is mainly viewed in terms of increasing service delivery in certification. For instance, development might be considered to be offering other certifications or using a web based interface for certification bodies; making more standards for standard setters and addressing loopholes or sharpening enforcement for regulator. Nothing wrong with any of that, but what does this really accomplish? Those that feel alienated in the system have been more innovative, for instance, the development of the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) is a good example. Others just stand aside criticising, but often have neither a consistent alternative development model nor a consistent vision.

Through government regulations harmonisation has been forced onto the sector. Though, this harmonisation has had short-term benefits, by lowering costs, for all involved, it could, in the longer term, be a straight-jacket. Organic regulations have become the final ruler of what is right, instead of letting the consumers and markets chose what is right. The latter is a more evolutionary and less fundamentalist approach. Today already, some consumers and activist have left the organic fold, not – I believe – because the sector has betrayed its roots, but rather because it has no expressed vision to be enthused by.

The main point of this discussion is to stimulate a debate on what path the organic movement should take in the future. Initially, it needs to be decoupled from the daily discussions about regulations and requirements. Instead it should be based on the four principles of organic farming: the principle of health, care,ecology and fairness. Then, sometime in the future, this needs to result in practical tools for development, tools that will serve us as well, or better, than the certified organic model that has worked so well for thirty years.  

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Eco labels: the more successful, the less value

 “The very traits — governance and inclusiveness — that make consensus-based standards so useful as credible mechanisms for collective action also pose challenges for businesses seeking to move quickly and to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. And like any tool, certification and labelling have limits — including limits to scale.” concludes a report from the consultancy Sustainability, 

33 years after the world’s first sustainability label (Germany’s Blue Angel) appeared, certifications and labels are now everywhere. The Ecolabel Index lists 426 certifications and labels in 25 industry sectors and 246 countries as of November 2011. Around two-thirds of these were developed in the last decade alone, and new schemes continue to arrive. And as our own research, the Organic Standard Directory shows that there are at least 124 organic standard, but probably many more, Nowadays it’s stating the obvious that consumers are confused by the sheer number of certifications and labels: according to the Natural Marketing Institute, 51% of American consumers think “there are too many green seals and certifications”; Only 42% of American consumers recognize Rainforest Alliance, 26% LEED and 19% Forest Stewardship Council, although 95% recognize Energy Star and 76% recognize USDA Certified Organic.

In the report “Signed, Sealed... Delivered? Behind Certifications and Beyond Labels”, the UK based consultancy Sustainability asks “Why certify or label?” The report, based on 85 interviews with businesses, standards-setters, certifiers and other expert observers as well as desk research places the question in the context of other ways available to businesses for improving or communicating sustainability impacts across the value chain.

The interviewed businesses expressed frustrations with the soundness of criteria (“based on perception or politics, not science”, “popular only because it was the first”), the level at which requirements are set (“too low — we can’t differentiate ourselves”), the fit for the business (“requires us to change our processes for no reason”), or the failure of the standard to adapt to new knowledge or processes (“hampers innovation”).

Committing to a single standard can limit sourcing flexibility in the case of raw materials standards. Agricultural certification illustrates this challenge emphatically. “At the moment, certification is the only process we have, but at some point we’ll have to jump to a completely different mechanism,” states Jan Kees Vis, global director of sustainable agriculture at Unilever. “We’re not going to certify every farmer in the world, we can’t create a roundtable for every raw material.” Another risk for businesses is that participation in a labelling schemer ties them to the reputation and viability of the standards-setting organization. The reports predicts that the model of a standard, certification and label on one coherent system carrying most of the message will fade. Sustainability believes that in the future sustainability certifications will be moved to the back-of-pack, metaphorically and literally. 

I do agree with this analysis.  I have been working with this sector for three decades, and while I still think there are many merits in eco labels and organic labels, I think it is increasingly apparent that there are many in-built limitations in what they can deliver. As I write in Garden Earth: "The attraction of an eco label, for businesses and consumers alike is to differentiate a product from other products that are without the label. But the more successful the label is the less value it has in a competitive market."

Related blog post in Garden Earth
Don't buy organic instead of changing the world - do it as part of changing the world
Sustainable coffee is increasing, but only 35% is sold as such.
How fair is fair?
What gives value to an eco label

 

 

What will happen if we all do like China?

In Europe and the USA, environmentalists have for decades used a rhetorical question: “what will happen if the Chinese adopts western lifestyles and consumption patterns?” The idea of the question is to show that the Western lifestyle is not sustainable (which it certainly isn't)

Perhaps we got it all wrong. Perhaps we should ask the opposite question? "What will happen if we adopt Chinese lifestyles and consumption patterns".

I just read that China, despite being a stumbling block in climate negotiations has the most extensive payment scheme for ecosystem services in the world, they spend some US$90 billion in payment for ecosystem services according to a recent report. In Garden Earth I write: 

In Europe and the USA, environmentalists have for decades used a rhetorical question: “what will happen if the Chinese adopts western lifestyles and consumption patterns?” Now, this question is no longer a rhetorical question. It is reality; it will not be answered by western environmentalists but by the Chinese themselves; because whatever the global impact is, the impact in China itself will be even greater. In 2006, there were 16 million electrical bicycles in China, in 2010 their numbers were probably 120 million (New York Times 2010b). Electrical bicycles are for sure no ideal and not unproblematic from an environmental perspective, they spread led from batteries and they need coal-generated electricity (ADB 2009). Nevertheless, they are clearly favourable compared to cars, and they represent just one of many examples of how they can avoid the mistakes of high-income countries. China is also the number one producer of solar technology.

I don't want to glorify China, neither for its environmental nor for its social policies. But I do think there is a tendency in the so called West to not see promising signs. We need to realise that the Chinese are not only good in churning out industrial goods, but they are also masters in managing the landscape, which is why China has continued to be a major force in the world for thousands of years, with dips now and then.

Who gave you your property?

La propriété, c'est le vol! said French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book Qu'est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernment (What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government). This perception was not new. The famous Marquis de Sade (Yes, the same guy whose name formed sadism) said:

"Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

Those who are in favour of property rights to be almost unlimited and sacrosanct tend to be the same as those who wants to limit the extent of government. But they, conveniently, overlook a very fundamental fact. They have got their property from government and it is only government that can ensure their perpetuated right to the property. Before there was government, before there were laws and a state that could enforce them there was no property. And in most societies most things “belonged to” the community or the state. The root of private property is a privilege extracted from governments. This continues today where governments convert new things to goods and markets, for instance eco-system services. The market and control of such services is instituted by governments and through various processes allocated to private owners. 

Over years, different groups, with the support of the state (or being part of the state) came to take over larger and larger parts of property, such as the war lords, later becoming the respected nobles or the financiers of the state's war, the emerging capitalists of high finance. It is estimated that some 1.5 million valuable items were stolen from the Old Summer Palace in China, when ransacked by the French and the British 1860. Victor Hugo (1985) wrote:

One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace.[...] All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewellery. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away.

To stimulate the transcontinental railway building, the US federal government gave one fourth of Minnesota and Washington and a fifth of Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and Montana to the rail road companies; an area bigger than France (Lindblom 2001). It is interesting to note that a professor in the stronghold for "free market" economics acknowledge this. "Land, natural resources, and government contracts and licenses are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires, and all of these factors come from the government" says Ragharam Rajan, economist in Chicago (IHT 2011), referring to billionaires of India (read also NYT).

And no doubt, enormous wealth and therefore property is generated by the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How property in the collapsing Soviet Union was distributed was a crash course in how property is unequally distributed to those that are close to the power. 

It is an entirely subjective and political decision weather some should be given unique rights to land or other resources or they should be common. A government could as well declare a universal right to food as the private right to land. For those, like the author, that is raised in a fully developed capitalist market society it is almost hard to conceptualise how a world without private property could look like. Still, in many parts of the world, forests and farm land are often owned by the state or by the local community. The point is neither that private property by itself is good or bad, nor to claim that anyone with property is a thief (which would then include myself as well). It is to clarify that it is a privilege based on state sanction, and that the unique rights that property has been given has very little to do in a discussion about freedom, and even less that property rights should form a moral justification for limitation of other peoples' freedom. First when we have cleared the myth, can we discuss property in a rational way.



"Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can" sings John Lennon in Imagine. This is probably our greatest challenge. To think outside the box.

Homo Petroleum

One sad fact with the internet is that it is so easy to find out if someone already "said it" or "thought it". Working with my latest manuscript, I had the idea to name our species after the dominating energy source used for the three main phases of development.
The hunting and gathering man - Homo something (yet to figure out - my Greek was never that good).
The farming man - Homo agricola
The industrial man - Homo petroleum 
The last thing recognizing the fundamental role oil (or fossil fuel in general) plays for our so called modern society. We often believe it is human ingenuity or technology or even "the market economy" that has made the modern world possible. But trust me, fossil fuel is the most prominent factor....

And of course I searched for Homo petroleum on the net and found that some other clever person already used the expression.


Discovering Homo Petroleum by Pouly


(original version in french)

Wisdom of Sonmi~451

"All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities" (Sonmi~451)

History of humankind in six frames

great illustration: Cassandra's legacy: History of humankind in six frames

Soil: wrong side up

"Author Joseph Kinsey Howard describes a spring day in 1883 in North Dakota when John Christiansen, a Scandinavian farmer, looked up while plowing a field to discover an old Sioux watching him. Silently the Sioux watched as the prairie grass was turned under. The farmer stopped the team, leaned against the plow handles, pushed his black Stetson back on his head, and rolled a cigarette. He watched amusedly as the Sioux knelt, thrust his fingers into the furrow, measured its depth, fingered the sod and the buried grass. Eventually the Sioux straightened up and looked at the immigrant. “Wrong side up,” said the Sioux and went away."

This comes from an article by Wes Jackson in YES!
The article is mainly about how to restore the prairies, or rather how to re-invent perennial systems of farming. He concludes:
"As civilizations have flourished, many upland landscapes that supported them have died, and desert and mudflat wastelands have developed. But civilizations have passed on accumulated knowledge, and we can say without exaggeration that these wastelands are the price paid for the accumulated knowledge. In our century this knowledge has restorative potential. The goal to develop a truly sustainable food supply could start a trend exactly opposite to that which we have followed on the globe since we stepped onto the agricultural treadmill some ten millennia ago."

Clearly soil erosion has caused the collapse of many civilizations. As I write in Garden Earth:

Environmental degradation has followed man since his first attempts to farm, well even before farming. Also hunters caused substantial degradation e.g. by the extermination of large mammals in North Americas or many bird species in the Pacific. Soil erosion is one of the most prevalent and also one of the most harmful kinds of environmental degradation. It was an issue of concern for rulers of ancient Greece as early as the sixth century B.C. The lawmaker Solon proposed a ban on cultivating hillsides in order to prevent erosion. The ruler Peisistratos rewarded peasants for planting olive trees instead of cutting down forests and grazing livestock. Two-hundred years later, Plato wrote of land devastation taking place in Attica:

“...in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains, as they are termed by us, of Phelleus were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains. Of this last the traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing there, which were of a size sufficient to cover the largest houses; and there were many other high trees, cultivated by man and bearing abundance of food for cattle. Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall, not as now losing the water which flows off the bare earth into the sea, but, having an abundant supply in all places, and receiving it into herself and treasuring it up in the close clay soil.” (Plato Critias)

If not dramatic collapse, so at least the slow decay of most civilizations can be traced back to soil erosion and wasteful agricultural practices. It is a sobering insight that there are very few agriculture systems that actually have proven to be really sustainable, and for many of those it is thanks to external factors that they are sustainable, not thanks to the ingenuity of humans. The fertility of the Nile valley and other flood plains is mainly a result of erosion up stream bringing every year new soil and new nutrients downstream. David Montgomery[1] states in Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations, that most historic cultures lasted between five hundred and one thousand years. They start off with fertile soils created by natural processes. Fertile soils in hills with good rainfall are brought into cultivation as population increases, but soil erosion makes fertility fall. Marginal lands are taken into cultivation where fertility plummets rapidly and finally the whole civilization collapse, the area is depopulated until nature replenishes the soils again. He shows that Schwarzwald (Black Forest, today dominated by forests as its name indicates) in Germany has gone through three such cycles (Montgomery 2007).

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[1]       David R. Montgomery is a Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, see a presentation here:

I have written several posts about soil and erosion. And even more about agriculture

Scarcity starts to bite

Norway has a shortage of butter, newsmedia report. Do we see the end of cornucopia? Will scarcity become part of everyday life in the future? 

"A radical change in food consumption and production in Europe is unavoidable to meet the challenges of scarcities and to make the European agro-food system more resilient in times of increasing instability and surprise. "

Is one of many conclusions of a recent report commissioned and endorsed by the European Union’s Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR), an advisory committee comprised of representatives of all 27 EU member states plus 10 additional European countries, which is headed by the European Commission

Main messages of the report are:

1. The increasing scarcity of natural resources and destabilization of environmental systems represents a real threat not only to future food supplies, but also to global stability and prosperity, as it can aggravate poverty, disturb international trade, finance and investment, and destabilise governments. Price volatility, access restrictions and the interconnectedness of global commodity markets, as well as the increasing vulnerability of food production systems to climate change and loss of agrobiodiversity, will make food even more inaccessible for the poor in the future.

2. Many of today´s food production systems compromise the capacity of Earth to produce food in the future. Globally, and in many regions including Europe, food production is exceeding environmental limits or is close to doing so. Nitrogen synthesis exceeds the planetary boundary by factor of four and phosphorus use has reached the planetary boundary. Land use change and land degradation, and the dependence on fossil energy contribute about one- fourth of Greenhouse Gas emissions. Agriculture, including fisheries, is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss. Regionally, water extracted by irrigation exceeds the replenishment of the resource.

3. Drastic change is needed in regard to both food demand and supply. In an era of scarcity, the imperative is to address production and consumption jointly in order to introduce the necessary feedbacks among them and to decouple food production from resource use. Efficiency and resilience are the new priorities over production levels. This transition cannot be met by following the common narrative of increasing productivity. The narrative of “sufficiency” opens opportunities for transition into sustainable and equitable food systems by a systemic approach that deals with the complex interactions of the challenges founded on a better understanding of socio-ecological systems.

4. The average Western diet with high intakes of meat, fat and sugar is a risk for individual health, social systems and the environmental life support systems. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis, and cancer are wide-spread diet-related diseases. The promotion of a healthy diet also reduces the environmental footprint of food consumption in Europe and globally.

5. Coherence between food, energy, environmental and health policies and across all levels of governance are prerequisites for a timely transition to sustainable and equitable food systems. A new quality of governance is needed at local, national and global level, with a substantial contribution by the State and civil society. Research should strongly support this improvement, and the role of social sciences may be crucial.

6. Diversity and coordination are key for increased efficiency and resilience of the future agro-food systems. It is a fact and a strength that food consumption and production systems are diverse. This diversity has to be maintained, or diversification be fostered, between different regions and farming systems. Diversity in research directions will keep all options open for reacting to surprises.

7. Research, innovation and agricultural knowledge systems must be fundamentally reorganized. To speed up transitions, tightly and actively integrate 1) multiple disciplines from ecology, economy, agronomy, social science, 2) research, innovation and 131 communication, 3) farmers, food retail, technology, industry and agricultural research, and organise research and innovation as learning processes.

8. Make Europe the world leader in efficiency and resilience research of food consumption and production. Ensure a strong role of public research, in particular to guarantee a better understanding of the underlying processes of ecosystem services and the interactions among the scarcities. The continuation of cooperative thematic research in environmental topics and food production and consumption is as critical as the maintenance and further development of European research infrastructures in these areas.

9. Sufficiency-oriented research, innovation and communication must become the priority. Explore new opportunities and ecological approaches to boost research and innovation on efficiency in resource use in agricultural production, including new farming systems that balance the three dimensions of sustainability, and food processing, including cascading uses and waste reduction. Address consumer behaviour and supply chain strategies (including information and communication) in favour of healthy sustainable diets that save food and feed resources and can help curb the increase in global food demand.

10. A radical change in food consumption and production in Europe is unavoidable to meet the challenges of scarcities and to make the European agro-food system more resilient in times of increasing instability and surprise. Europe has already taken up the climate change challenge in industry and is intending to make new energy technologies a win-win-win strategy for market, labour and human welfare. Now the agro-food sector has an opportunity to positively take the challenge and be the first to win the world market for how to sustainably produce healthy food in a world of scarcities and uncertainty.

The report point outs the far-reaching effect of energy scarcity on food production: 

Oil scarcity may affect the food system in two ways: (1) shocks, that are a sudden deviation from normality; and (2) stresses, which are a continuous trend of intensification of the problem. Shocks would strike most where the system is most oil dependent: for example, the British system is very efficient, but heavily dependent on long distance sourcing, and a crisis in the energy sector may put food access of the Britons in danger. In countries with less efficient power distribution, the damage and chaos resulting from a black out could be much worse. Stresses could manifest themselves in a trend of rising prices, and if unattended, could bring to forms of adaptation which might be far from
efficient. Among the possible effects of stresses on agriculture related to oil prices there could be:
· Increase of costs of production, bringing a reduction of fertilizer and pesticide use, especially by resource poor farmers, and therefore a reduction of yields and / or impoverishment of soils (Jaggard et al., 2009).
· Increasing profitability of energy production from agriculture, that would generate problems for land use competition and consequently to further rise in food prices
· Reduction of consumption and changing dietary patterns, that may lead to an increase in
malnutrition.

I would add the affect of reduced global competition which would follow as a result of increased energy prices. This reduced competition pressure would increase food prices for the benefit of farmers and local production.These kinds of effects are the ones that really will shape the world when energy is getting more and more costly. And the effects are not necessarily bad. All in all, increasing energy prices are likely to be a blow to the industrial agriculture model, but not necessarily bad as it will make better methods, such as organic more competitive. The changing dietary pattern following energy scarcity is also more likely positive rather than negative.

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The report is written by: Annette Freibauer (chair), Erik Mathijs (rapporteur), Gianluca Brunori, Zoya Damianova, Elie Faroult, Joan Girona i Gomis, Lance O´Brien, Sébastien Treyer 

Location divide is more important than class divide today

A very interesting study by Branko Milanovic from the World bank concludes that differences in income between countries have increased tremendously in our modern society. And these difference also extent to salaries of workers. The difference in salary between worker in the richest countries and the poorest countries were small at the footstep of modern industrial society. Today, they are huge.

Among many things, it means that:
- capitalist globalisation has lead to increasing gaps, not decreasing (which is why the elite loves it)
- workers in the industrial countries are most likely profiting from exploitation of workers in developing countries (which is why it is hard to engage them in a global social movement).
- migration has a lot more appeal than ever before, and its potential to reduce difference in income is great(which is why there is such resistance to it).

Read also the post:

Growing inequality, between people, between countries, between region, between urban and rural

Some quotes from the report below

"Inequality between world citizens in mid-19th century was such that at least a half of it could be explained by income differences between workers and capital-owners in individual countries. Real income of workers in most countries was similar and low. This was the basis on which Marxism built its universal appeal. More than 150 years later, in the early 21st century, the situation has changed fundamentally: more than 80 percent of global income differences is due to large gaps in mean incomes between countries, and unskilled workers' wages in rich and poor countries often differ by a factor of 10 to 1. This is the basis on which a new global political issue of migration has emerged because income differences between countries make individual gains from migration large. The key coming issue will be how to deal with this challenge while acknowledging that migration is probably the most powerful tool for reducing global poverty and inequality."

"Angus Maddison has estimated that around 1850, the mean income in the poorest countries in the world (Ceylon and China) was around $PPP 600. 5 At the top were the Netherlands and the United Kingdom with a GDP per capita of about $PPP 2,300. Thus, the ratio between the top and the bottom (of country mean incomes) was less than 4 to 1. Consequently, the better-off workers who earned incomes close to the national means, could not, in terms of their standard of living, differ from each other by more than the ratio of 4 to 1. And the bulk of workers who lived at less than their countries’ average income and closer to the subsistence, could not have incomes that differed by more than 2 to 1—with many of them living at approximately the same subsistence level. Indeed, Broadberry and Gupta (2006, Table 6, p. 17) show that in the period 1800-1849, the wheat-wage of an unskilled daily laborer in India (among the poorest countries in the world then) was about 30% of the wage of a similar worker in England. And comparing the Netherlands with the Yangtze valley, two relatively developed areas sharing a number of similar geographic features, Li and van Zanden (2010, p. 21) conclude that in the 1820s, real wages in the Netherlands were about 70% higher than in the Yangtze valley."

"In 1870, the gap between the richest countries (Australia and Great Britain) and the poorest (Nepal and Ghana) was 8 to 1; in 2007, it is 31 to 1 (United States and Norway vs. Nepal, North Korea and Ghana)."

The internet isn't really bringing us together...

Excellent analysis by Ramesh Srinivasan, in the Washington Post

"We’ve long heard that the Internet was supposed to unite people of different cultural and political persuasions. Yet, despite the explosion of online voices, social-media users rarely access opinions that differ from their own, and many social-media sites — with their bifurcated like/dislike, join/don’t join ethos — only perpetuate the sound-bite culture of older media.Not only are our Facebook friends similar to us (we usually connect through mutual friends and shared interests), but researcher Ethan Zuckerman has shown that the sites we visit reaffirm our political and cultural preconceptions. This homogenization reaches the very machinery of social media — its algorithms — which tailor search results or Facebook feeds according to what the systems “think” users will find most interesting."

I would venture that TV and Radio probably did a lot more to bring us together than the internet. This because of the more limited number of voices in those media. It is simply more unifying that everybody sees the same TV show and listen to the same radio. This was also a reason for why totalitarian ideologies as fascism and soviet style communism were keen users of radio and movies.  

In a way it is a similar experience that I found from moving from a city, to the country side and back again. In the city you can easily congregate with your own mind-fellows and age-fellows, even the same old gang you went to school with. Even if you live in an environment with a lot of information and opinions around you don't often confront these other opinions. When you live in the country side you interact with the few people that are there, regardless of age, interest or political or religious orientation. Perhaps this is exaggerated a bit, but that is what you do to make a tendency clear.

Aging populations will end growth

Those that thinks that our society will continue along the same path forget that the Western European countries just have undergone a “once-in-the-millennium” demographic transition, which will never happen again, and that the USA are still in this transition and China has reached there as well. Throughout history of mankind, a relatively stable population has been normal and the rapid population growth of the last 200 years is the abnormal. The end to population growth is perhaps a bigger challenge for the capitalist project than the population explosion; after all, the population explosion had gone hand in hand with the capitalist expansion. A country like Japan has completed its transition and there has been virtually no growth for twenty ears and a constant "crisis". 

The changing population pyramid will change society. Many manufacturers, service providers and retailers are adapting their offers to be more appealing to rapidly growing groups of elderly, who are also used to be active consumers (earlier generations of old people were still not raised as “consumers”). Politically, the care for the elderly was earlier mainly a question of relief for the working generation, and it was their perspective that dominated; the elderly were “objects” rather than subjects. Today it is the old people themselves that shape how care of them is developed with a combination of political action and letting their considerable wealth speak. Less observed, but equally important, is the shift in values that will come.

The demographic transition shape societies. The big cohorts of young people that characterized the youth of capitalism and industrialism is the demographic reflection of the expansion and pioneership. Like with so many other things one can also turn this on the head and say that it was this demographic structure that drove capitalism in its early stages. It is not only economic growth that is propelled by a big share of young people; it is also the values typical for the young such as rejection of traditions, rebellion, glorification of strength, risk taking and body culture. Our current society's glorification of youth stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of earlier cultures. 

Society, but also many old themselves has a kind of youth obsession. Old people are expected to behave as “old youth” in a similar way as children were treated as “small adults” some hundred years ago. Eighty year olds engage in mountaineering, speed dating, wind surfing or parachuting: 

Former President George H.W. Bush marked his 85th birthday on Friday the same way he did his 75th and 80th birthdays: He leaped from a plane and zoomed downward at more than 100 mph in free fall before parachuting safely to a spot near his ocean front home.[...] He told reporters that he jumped Friday for two reasons: to experience the exhilaration of free-falling and to show that seniors can remain active and do fun things." Just because you're an old guy, you don't have to sit around drooling in the corner," Bush said  (AP 2009).

 This is about to change. Other properties, other characteristics of being human, will be in higher esteem for elderly people. Properties like maturity and reflection and even slowness (e.g. Slow Food) itself. Add to that, values such as care, spirituality and safety, opposition to risk-taking. Care for things close and interest in the beauty of and satisfaction by the small things in life are also typical for age, in contrast to youth's taste of exploration, expansion and novelties. The values of the old are better adapted to the values needed in a sustainable society. The combined effect of the shift in values and the effect on growth, caused by an aging population will be a strong determining factor the coming century. 

read more

7 Billion and Peak Child

The population follows our production system

 

Money: The only way to assign value to anything is to sell it.

Adam Smith (1776) stated that labour is the real standard by which the value of commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared, and money is only a nominal price. How far we have gone in those 240 years! Today the notion that labour represent the real value would be seen as quaint or perhaps communist, even if Marx was the one that realised that through capitalism, labour is no longer a standard value, but a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. Money is like an alphabet with only one sign says Alf Hornborg (2010). That is the reason for why you can't communicate any meaning with money, anything more nuanced than a call to consume, i.e. to use up resources. In the market society the only way to assign a value to anything is to sell it, which means that things that are outside the market circulation almost by definition has no value. Well, reality is a bit more complex than that, we know that our personal relationships are not traded and we certainly enjoy them, and most people still enjoy many free pleasures, but policy makers are increasingly discussing access to those freebees, such as a forest, in terms of willingness-to-pay-for. 

In economics, there are attempts to add more "real" values to ecosystem services and assign costs to the depletion of natural and social capital as well as to pollution. However, in order to have an impact on "policy makers" all this has to be expressed in dollars, in money. It's like the system of bride prices or dowry, where you assign material values to the union of two people. But as little as a dowry is an indicator of love are the values assigned to ecosystem services an expression of their real values. With money as the determinant of value, we make nature a subsystem of the economy. That is one reason for why the efforts of valuing environmental services are not sufficient to re-direct our economy from the path of self-destruction - and why it even can be negative in the long run. A similar problem we have in the valuation of work. By definition, market prices are always "right". This serves as a justification of that a business leader earns 100 times as much as his workers, or that an worker in the rich countries are "worth" twenty times as much as a worker in a poor country or fifty times as much as a small-holder farmer. In this way, money obscures the reality, and justifies the logic of exploitation and inequality. In the short term, as measures to slow down or even reverse environmental destruction, assigning values to environmental services, and fees for their use, or assigning costs to pollution makes a lot of sense, exactly because it works within the capitalist economic paradigm. In the longer term though, we need to find other ways because ecologist can't do a better job of managing capitalism than economists. 

We can also discuss the economic system in ecological terms, in biophysical terms. This makes a lot of sense, at least for analytical purposes, because our economy is a subsystem of the physical system we live in. The idea is to instead of expression of the economic system in monetary values, it is expressed in "real" values, such as land use, labour, tons of minerals extracted. What comes out of that is certainly very interesting as it clearly exposes destruction of nature; increase in entropy as well as the social disparities. From this, there is of course a big step to implement a system whereby our current currency would be attached to one or more of such "real" values. In the end, you would have to select one parameter, like gold was such a parameter for a long period, and once you do that you would experience problems.

(extract from Garden Earth)

The best painters in the romantic tradition: corporations

It is hardly a surprise that a broad study of the application of Corporate Social Responsibility shows that it is mostly hot air and high ambitions,  but little actual delivery. 

"The quality of environmental data in sustainability reports remains appalling at times, even today," said Dr Ralf Barkemeyer, a lecturer in CSR at Leeds and one of the team leaders. "In financial reporting to leave out an undisclosed part of the company in the calculation of profits would be a scandal. In sustainability reporting it is common practice. Put provocatively, companies get points for knowing where they want to go, but nobody seems to check whether this is where they are heading. Aspiration replaces performance."

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As I write in Garden Earth :

"Not only products, but also companies can be certified for being environmentally friendly or socially responsible. The layman might believe that companies that have a certified environmental management system (ISO 14000 or EMAS) are performing better in the environmental arena than those companies that have no such system. This impression is enhanced by the certified companies, the consultants helping them and the certification bodies selling certificates stating compliance. They use expressions like “environment certified” or “eco certified” (118,000 and 83,000 hits on Google July 2010). These certifications mean not much more than that national legislation is followed; that the company has a system to control its environmental effects and that the environmental impact is monitored. It is also, typically, the worst industries that are keen on letting themselves be certified to these standards. There is less direct value in terms of improved performance from these systems than from eco-labels. Companies, nevertheless, or perhaps exactly because of this, are more keen on these systems. 

It is not negative as such, they still, mostly, perform better than they would without these systems, but it is misleading when they are promoted as making a big difference. In all fairness, there are companies that try. Swedish McDonald’s reuses 90 percent of all packaging: uses up to 90 percent renewable electricity: serves organic coffee and milk and has a ventilation system that adjusts itself to the numbers of visitors thereby saving a lot of energy (and money…) (McDonald’s 2008). Coca Cola aims to be “water neutral” by 2020 and Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining companies, launched its biodiversity strategy in 2004 with a voluntary commitment to achieve ‘Net Positive Impact’ on biodiversity. To fulfil this commitment, the company first aims to reduce its impacts on biodiversity through avoidance, minimization and rehabilitation activities, and then aims for a positive impact through the use of biodiversity offsets and additional conservation actions (TEBB 2010). What this means in reality remains to be seen. 

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or just Corporate Responsibility is another concept that has been adopted by large part of business, cheered by governments and United Nations. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, launched a CSR initiative called Global Compact in 1999. In the same manner as companies that produce rubbish get quality certification (ISO 9000) and the worst polluters are certified for their environmental managements systems (ISO 14000) companies committed to CSR are often involved in questionable business. The military contractor BAE shows their responsibility by lead free bullets and less poison in missiles and grenades causing less pollution (Porrit 2007). Scandal companies like Enron and many of the banks that were caught red-handed in the financial crisis 2008/2009 are among the pioneers in CSR. "

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Jonathon Porrit commented on that the tobacco company BAT was identified as a "leader in sustainability" 2008, he said in the Guardian:   

"Any case of so called leading companies in CSR that includes BAT is a sick joke." He added: "Central to sustainability and business models is fully priced risks and fully allocating capital properly. When any company is systematically mispricing risks and systematically misallocating capital it makes no sense to talk about corporate responsibility. We're going to have to face the fact some of the measures used to judge relative CSR performance are useless."

One reasons for why CSR will never bring substantial changes is that the business plan of corporations include the externalization of costs: The business plan of the factory is to produce externalities

To a very large extent, many of our industrial technologies are about producing "externalities". The industrial capitalist model extracts resources in distant places (destroying other peoples' nature and possibly livelihoods), it has workers do something with them and pay them only part of the added value, the cost of pollution is carried by the local communities, the cost of health care is footed by society, the cost of schooling the workers is covered by society etc. The products are sold at a profit and the waste is someone else's problem.

Don't buy organic instead of changing the world - do it as part of changing the world

Are there really any benefits for the farmers in developing countries that engage in organic or fair trade schemes?

A recent literature review casts doubts on the merit of "sustainability" certification systems. It includes studies of Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance and the Forest Stewardship council. The authors Allen Blackman and Jorge Rivera note that rather few studies have a rigorous control against non-certified production, which is needed to form a scientific basis for claims that certification is beneficial for producers.

The 11 rigorous studies provided very weak evidence for the hypothesis that sustainable certification has positive environmental, social, or economic effects at the producer level. Only four of the 11 provided evidence of such benefits (Table 3). Of these four, all tested for economic effects. In two of these four studies, both on coffee, the authors remark that the benefits are either idiosyncratic or inconsistent (Arnould et al. 2009; Bolwig et al. 2009). The results of the remaining seven rigorous studies (two studies of environmental effects and five of social and economic effects) did not show that certification benefits producers.

As the authors note "the hypothesis that certification benefits the environment or producers is limited. More evidence could be generated by incorporating rigorous, independent evaluation into the design and implementation of projects promoting certification."


One of the few studies that show economic benefits is the one of Bolwig and others, The economics of smallholder organic contract farming in tropical Africa. I was personally engaged in those projects studied, in the EPOPA programme. It was successful mainly because it was designed with the explicit purpose to be commercial and increase farmers income (and hopefully because it was well implemented).It spoke less about sustainability and smallholder empowerment than most similar programs, but generated more direct results in terms of increased income, and with low costs compared to many other projects.

It is worrying, however, that there is so little result coming out of so big efforts, even more troubling considering that the vast majority of all situations with certified smallholders are in to form of "projects" where substantial external funds are used to support them. As a matter of fact, I have yet to come across any small farmer project with sustainability certification which has not benefited external support; most of them are even established by external actors.To include even more rigorous evaluations and scientific monitoring of the projects, as suggested by the authors, will make the projects even more donor dependent and consultant dependent, and decrease the efficiency of the deployment of resources substantially.

I think the jury is still out regarding the direct and indirect benefits of the sustainability schemes. But what should be clear, even without more scientific studies, is that the economic benefits, and environmental benefits are limited. And that is not because the schemes are bad. There is simply no way such schemes can shift global economic relations fundamentally. Not even Fair trade, which has this as it's focus is more than a marginal adjustment of fundamental factors such as unjust trading relations and an ongoing exploitation of smallholders; limited access to resources and therewith associated low labor productivity; and inequality. As a matter of fact there is no particular evidence that fair trade farmers have any higher income than organic ones.

Note that this study is about farms in developing countries, there are numerous studies about farms in developed countries that show environmental benefits for organic farming. When it comes to economy it is a more complex picture. But clearly, organic farms in developed countries are exposed to the same commercial pressures as non-organic and respond in more or less the same way: more specialization, larger farms, more input buying etc., because that is the logic of the competitive market economy, whether you like it or not.



My suggestion is not that we should throw the sustainability schemes overboard, but that we should realise that they will not make the Big Difference which is needed to reach a fair(er) world. Go on and buy organic, but don't do it instead of changing the world, but as part of changing the world. 

Read also:

How Fair is Fair?

Guilt Free

What gives value to an ecolabel? 
Agriculture: How cheap energy (and capitalism) increased the gaps between rich and poor 
Traditions, Western Union, Churches and Taro 
Green Economy a win-win-win?

 

Stop pretending there are only winners in the global market

 Obama: "Increase Competitiveness"!

"My principal focus, my number one focus, is going be making sure that we are competitive, that we are growing, and we are creating jobs not just now but well into the future"

What is striking is that the same groups that emphasize that there are only winners and no losers with globalization; that it is beneficial for everybody, they constantly remind us of how important it is that “we keep our edge”, or “improve out competitiveness”, that we upgrade our society so that we are in the forefront of research and technical development.

The columnist Thomas L Friedman writes in the World is Flat that:

So if the flattening  of the world is largely (but no entirely) unstoppable, and holds out the potential to be as beneficial to American society as a whole as the past market evolutions have been. How does an individual get the best out of it? What do we tell our kids?. There is only one message: You have to constantly upgrade your skills. There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with the knowledge and ideas to seize them. I am not suggesting that this will be simple. It will not be (Friedman 2005).

This is echoed by politician from all kinds of camps and by institutions such as in the European Union's vision 2020.

Our economies are increasingly interlinked. Europe will continue to benefit from being one of the most open economies in the world but competition from developed and emerging economies is intensifying. Countries such as China or India are investing heavily in research and technology in order to move their industries up the value chain and "leapfrog" into the global economy. This puts pressure on some sectors of our economy to remain competitive, but every threat is also an opportunity. As these countries develop, new markets will open up for many European companies (European Commission 2010).

Clearly, if it is so important for the USA and Europe to be ahead of the pack, it must be because the ones falling behind are “losers”, i.e. globalization is actually more of a threat for them than an opportunity. Why can't we just relax a bit, spend our energy on cleaning up the environment, reducing our ecological foot-print and enjoy a good life, instead of being coerced into working harder and harder to keep the edge?

There are inherent inequalities that drive the global trade. The global "division of labour" that is the basis for globalisation is as much a global "division of power" as the difference between the capitalist industrialist and his workers. Alf Hornborg shows how, in 1850, when England swapped cotton fabric for 1000 pounds with cotton lint for the same sum, it corresponded to an exchange of 4,000 hours of work in a textile mill with more than 32,000 hours in tropical cotton production, as well as the resource of 58 hectares of land (Hornborg 2006). All factors point to that the patterns of exploitation inherent in globalization are the same today. It is mainly because of the big difference in purchasing power of the "rich" as opposed to the poor that the rich can benefit from the cheap coffee from Nicaragua, the cell phone from China or the service of the call centre in the Philippines. And it is the knowledge of this that makes it so important "to keep the edge".
The text is derived from Garden Earth

"Competitiveness, which is usually measured in terms of unit labor costs, is a relative concept. One country’s gain is another’s loss. Restoring competitiveness in some member countries (Spain, Greece) would require others (Germany in the first instance) to accept deterioration in theirs." writes Daniel Gros in an relevant post, Europe's Competitiveness Obsession

Some good news from Brussels

It is always nice to have something positive to say. Below is my leader for the last issue of The Organic Standard

Congratulations, is the right greeting for the more than thirty certification bodies that have recently been approved by the European Union as providing equivalent guarantees that organic products are produced to standards equivalent to those within the European Union.

And congratulations are also in order for the Commission which managed to take this decision. It took two years. Hopefully we will see the process handled quicker in the future. It is hard to know the reasons why the process was so slow, apart from the fact that there seems to be a constant lack of human resources to implement increasingly complex regulations, developed by the European Union. As a result of the lack of transparency
- no list of applicants has, for example, been published - in the dealings of the European Union we are often left to guess when discussing the work of the Commission. For more than a year there was no communication from the Commission to the applicants. Initially, the Commission believed that it could make a simple ‘yes or no’ decision based on each applicant’s initial submission.

It appears, however, that hardly any certification body would have been approved if the Commission had followed that line. So finally, the Commission was forced to communicate
with the applicants. It appears that many of the well established European certification bodies and their accreditation bodies were a trifle too self-confident that they would be
approved and they paid the price. It is known that European accreditation bodies were disgruntled that many of the certification bodies that they have accredited did not get approval by the EU. Likewise, some Member States were not happy that certification
bodies based in their countries failed. Two times the organic committee failed to reach a decision on the list, but on the third attempt they approved it with only minor changes. The Commission should have credit for staying the course.

The winners are the underdogs; those certification bodies that for years have fought hard for acceptance in a competitive field where the EU based certification bodies had a much
easier access to approval. It is also a great victory for the International Organic Accreditation Services (IOAS). A substantial proportion of the certification bodies approved by the Commission are accredited by the IOAS, which means that their standard was assessed by the IOAS. The IOAS has had to fight for recognition by providing excellent service, competing in the EU with national accreditation bodies that are often considered ‘competent by default’ as they have nobody checking them.

There are still things in the model that need improvement. Current decisions are limited to a particular country, and certification bodies must prove that they have worked in a particular country to have this country included in their approval. This will be possible in a transitional situation where products can also be approved in other ways. But once the old import approval system is discarded, this will pose real problems for all those that work mainly with EU exports, a classic catch-22 situation. There are similar issues associated with how the scope of approval will be extended to include new product categories and
even a new standard. In addition, the system has not solved the problem of new entrants. If a certification body operates in a market where certification services are basically demanded for exports, how does it get its first approval if it has to demonstrate proof of actual operation? Which clients will buy the certification body’s services if it is not approved? The Commission should look into how its own Members States have solved this, and offer those on the others side of the frontier the same opportunities.

For a long time the EU offered import approvals based on single lots. These were administered by the Member States, and though it was a messy and unpredictable system it
did provide a pragmatic solution to a problem. A big step forward took place when the USA opened up direct accreditation of certification bodies as an option for imports, rather than
only approving countries. This appeared to be a lot better than the EU system, however, as more countries introduced the same system it is also apparent that such a system is very
resource-demanding. Some certification bodies pay the US Department of Agriculture more than fifty thousand dollars for their accreditation. Paying such sums for dozens, or even
hundreds, of separate accreditations is simply not rational. Also, insisting that overseas farmers comply in minute detail to the accrediting country’s standards is very far from
an organic perspective. The world needs to move towards a situation where one approval, one standard and one supervision is enough. The EU system is not there but it certainly is a
big step in the right direction.

Tale from the sandpit

Once upon a time there were two producers of sand, Henry and Loser. They dug out the sand from the same place, with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The sand was sold at the side of the road to by-passers. They didn’t earn a lot but enough to survive, to send their children to school, and buy a new wheelbarrow and shovel every other year. The little they could save was used for funerals or if someone in their families fell sick, or had an accident.

One day, for reasons we don’t have to discuss here, Henry was able to buy an excavator. It was expensive and the fuel is also expensive – but still, he can dig sand thousand times faster then before. And he can dig longer hours, his machine works all around the clock and he has bought a truck to supply customers with sand. Through the increased productivity sand prices fall, and therefore consumption increases. More houses and roads are built, the wealth increases. Henry produces more and more sand.

 Taste the word “produce” by the way. Doesn’t that give the impression that Henry creates something, that he creates the sand? In our way of speaking we say that we “produce” when we dig up a piece of nature and sell it. And “our wealth increases”? How, when there is less and less sand left and one has to dig deeper and deeper to get it, can we say that wealth increases? Pertinent questions, but let’s put them aside and look at Loser.

 Loser leads a hard life. The price of sand falls again and again, and the clients now want to have the sand delivered to their doorstep. And the sand is deeper and further away as Henry’s excavators dig more and more. Clients also have very specific demands on the sand, it should be graded in various fractions and there must be no ”foreign” materials. One day a client even asked about the social conditions for Loser’s employees.

Loser looked at him with an empty look: “I have no employees, it is just me and my family.”
“How much do you pay yourself? And what about the children, do they go to school?” the conscientious client asked.
Loser had to admit that he had to take one of the boys out of school to help carry the sand to the clients and that one girl had been taken out of school as they no longer could afford her school uniform, books and pencils. The conscientious client said, “we can no longer buy from you; I am sure you understand that we have to take social responsibility.”

Another client was concerned that Loser was destroying nature, “Didn’t you destroy a fox burrow the other year, when expanding the sand pit?”
“Well I did”, Loser said, “but Henry’s excavators are driving this, they take almost all sand; the little I dig up makes hardly any difference”.
The client replied, “Henry has an environmental policy; he offsets damages here by protecting precious sand dunes in Morocco. Also, he made a very nice mountain bike track for the children in old parts of the pit. He is a good example of corporate responsibility, while you are just destroying the environment.”

As you might have realized by now, life was hard for Loser. Every year his income shrank. When the wheelbarrow broke down, he couldn’t buy a new one. Another child had to quit school and carry the sand in buckets.

For a short while he had a rebound. A consultant from the regional development agency came and told him to look for another market niche; sell sand for special purposes and not “commodity-sand”. “There is a huge demand” the consultant said, “and there is special support for such local quality production” he said, before driving off in his SUV leaving a cloud of dust in his tracks. As long as the support kept coming in it was okay. The support ended, clients were unreliable and fads came and went and as soon as some business was lucrative enough Henry went in and out-competed him. One day Loser had to throw in the towel for good. He now lives on social support.

Our little story shows what happens in an unequal world with free trade and access to fossil fuel; where the price of oil determines the “value” of human labor. That is one of the most important factors in the story. It is simply not possible for human muscle power to compete with fossil fuel driven machinery. We might think that gas is expensive, but a barrel of oil has as much energy as 14 peoples’ annual labor. The absolute poverty line is 1 dollar per day, which is more or less the lowest salary one can pay any place on earth. Even with such deplorable salary, the cost for 14 peoples annual work is around 5,000 dollars, while a barrel of oil costs 100 dollars.

For sure, once can’t compare oil and human toil one-to-one. Human labor has skills and intelligence. True, that is why we have machines to convert energy into something useful. The market is also rarely as “free” as in this example; people with so varied conditions hardly compete next to each other. Some simplifications are made. But with cheap transportation technologies and largely deregulated markets differences in market conditions have plummeted, and prices for most commodities are converging on the planet.

Some may also say that there is rarely such a competition for resources as in this example. To some extent this is true, but seen in a global perspective and long term, there is just one planet with a certain quantity of any resource.  The first oil brought into the industrial economy was available, in good quality, in abundant shallow reserves on land and was therefore very cheap to extract. Oil is now pumped from big depth under difficult conditions, and qualities are often lower, simply because the best sources are long depleted. To be closer to the example, there is even a global market for sand, which is a scarce resource in some places, for example, Singapore imports sand from the USA.

The relevance of our story is most easily seen in agriculture, where farmers using the most basic hand tools, such as a hoe or a spade, are competing with farmers who have a machine fleet that is worth millions of dollars. In this case, the labor of the small farmer is competing with oil and machinery. Making things even more absurd, the highly mechanized farmers are subsidized by their governments. To borrow money for an investment costs them a few percent in interest rate, while the poor have to pay twenty to forty percent interest rates for loans – if they can get any. The conditions for competition in the so-called “free market” are exactly so skewed.

The brutal truth is that there is no future for most of the half a billion small farmers of the world in this market place.  A few can survive by going for niche, organic or high-value products, others have to migrate out of the farm sector, and they do. There are, however fewer employment opportunities for them than there were for my grandparents in Sweden who could go from farming to industries that needed workers. And there is no space for the farmers to invest so that they could compete more fairly with “us”.

These are the conditions that we should discuss when we discuss global poverty and starvation (and not increasing GMOs or the use of chemical fertilizers). These are the conditions which actually make the poor poorer. The neo-liberal market doctrines can’t produce viable solutions to the poverty trap of billion people.

We must realize that a “free” market in a deplorably unequal world is not “free” at all. One percent of the world’s population controls around half of all wealth and gaps are widening. When we have so different access to resources, a free market creates bigger gaps and not only relative but also absolute poverty.

The way out? Well, I don’t say it is easy. I don’t claim that we will solve the problems with government regulations, tariffs and government monopolies – in most cases these have had devastating effects. The first step is to clearly see the problems that are generated by a capitalist market economy and fossil fuel, and realize that their root causes are systemic and structural. The solutions are therefore to be found in alternatives to this.  How they can look like is a subject of another fairy tale.

”One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting 

to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

– André Gide

This was first published on my Swedish blog and now in English on the excellent Post Growth blog.  Other posts on Post Growth that are closely related to this one are:
 Four Degrees of Sharing, Two Myths That Keep The World Poor,  Freedom from money