The danger of predictable procedures

Days go by. Years go by. A new procedure is added to an old one, the system expands and it becomes more and more difficult to manage. Special systems are developed to manage the more and more complex system, and others are put there to monitor that the system to manage the system is systematically and consistently applied.

We all know the story. We have seen it. Some even claim that this increasing complexity
brought down empires. When the purpose is to protect citizens from ills it is even easier to accept that there is no end to what can be done and, therefore, has to be done. Airport security is a very clear example in point. However, now after a decade of ever increasing scrutiny and more procedures, not only passengers, but also security officials, question the wisdom of this. In a poll reported by The Economist, 87% of the respondents thought that changes implemented since 2001 had done more harm than good.

Kip Hawley, the former head of the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), says in an article in the Wall Street Journal that the system needs reform. Two of the issues he singled out are also of particular relevance to the organic inspection and certification system. By checking a multitude of minute details, focus is easily lost
from the really important issues. Tests conducted by the TSA itself show that when officers are busy hunting cigarette lighters and pocket knives they may very well overlook
the dummy bomb parts placed next to them. And by making the system predictable and rigid, terrorists are helped more than deterred.

Organic operators are not airline passengers and the odd fraudster in the organic sector is not a terrorist; it is likely there are many more organic fraudsters in my plane than terrorists. Nevertheless, these observations may well hold for the organic inspection
and certification system. I have come across certification bodies, and regulatory authorities for which ‘annual inspection’ meant literally every 12 months, making it completely predictable when the next inspector will come. The minute detail that is recorded and made an issue of – largely a result of standards and certification requirements growing exponentially – substantially reduces the attention that is given to
more important things, and in particular to any kind of qualitative evaluation. The word ‘evaluation’ is probably missing from most audit forms.

Instead of helping, quality management systems used by certification bodies, aggravate the problem. The main tool for quality management is a standard operating procedure, which essentially means actions are predictable – for fraudsters as well as all other operators. Creativity and acting on a hunch or intuition are largely banned from such a system. But making imaginative, unprecedented effort can yield a lot more than following a prescribed course. For instance, in most cropping systems, there is a specific period when fertilisrs are applied. However, a few weeks after an application it is basically impossible to determine whether a fertiliser has been used or not. Despite this, most farms are never visited at those times. Certification bodies could redirect their effort one year to visit most or all farms at the critical time – or the time of sowing to detect treated seeds, or the time of insect attacks to determine use of a pesticide. But it would not be possible to conduct full inspection visits because that would be too resource demanding. Likewise,
to make a full, comprehensive (on site and crosschecking information) audit of a whole supply chain of products randomly selected (or based on a suspicion) in shops could disclose fraud in a way that routine audits hardly ever do.

There are many good and creative measures that can be taken to improve the organic certification system, and there are many good ideas among the talented people working within the system. But the attention of certifiers, accreditors and regulators is far too
often directed at the management of a system of ever increasing complexity. Unfortunately, when systems are too rigid they also drive away creative people, as they can’t flourish. In this way, the system produces people who believe there is only one right way of doing the job. And that is not a good starting point – neither for disclosing organic fraud nor for detecting terrorists in the making.

Published as Leader in The Organic Standard issue 133

Organic agriculture: the Swiss army knife

The strength of organic farming is that it is multifunctional, that is, it performs many different services at the same time, like a Swiss army knife – a popular multifunctional tool. But that also means for any particular issue seen in isolation, there will be a better tool. Organic standards developed mainly within the organic community, and largely by organic farmers and gardeners and small groups of activist ‘consumers’. Gradually other groups became engaged in the standard-setting process, for example, processors and special interest groups, such as animal welfare groups, social activist groups or environmental groups. Through regulation, governments also became active, getting engaged in several different roles. The government has the role of balancing the interests of different groups, to ensure that they are all fairly represented and considered. This can be a very useful role if performed correctly, especially in regard to ensuring marginalised groups are included in deliberations. The government, which has access to considerable expertise from within, can also provide technical expertise in matters of standards. Governments, often, use their regulations to manifest their power over the sector. This is achieved in many ways, for instance by making certification bodies accountable to the government and by setting standards that are not grounded in organic traditions. It is unfortunate when regulations are driven by this desire to assert power. The organic sector has little to gain from this kind of regulatory approach. Ultimately, it has little value for the government as well. The kind of very heavy-handed regulation that the Chinese government has introduced is likely to drive many stakeholders out of the organic market place, in a similar way that the Japanese regulation did some ten years ago. Clearly, governments have both the right and obligation to take action if blatant fraud is prevalent in the organic market place, which seems to have been the case in China, but this can be done in many ways. Preferably it is carried out in a partnership with the sector rather than as a dictate from the government. Governments are also stakeholders in the standards process, influencing organic (and other) standards in pursuing public interest goals, goals that are normally not pushed by any of the key parties. Such goals could be the development for the public good, such as improved biodiversity. It could also be about avoiding public ills, such as pollution from the handling of animal manure. Increasingly, organic agriculture is promoted as an option for mitigating climate change. And there are some reasons for this. Organic agriculture uses less energy than its non-organic counterpart, mainly because of the avoidance of nitrogen fertilisers, thus causing less carbon emissions. Organic agriculture also maintains or improves soil organic matter compared to non-organic systems, thus causing less carbon emissions and it can even work as a substantial carbon sink. But these broad statements are expressions of average performance; they don’t mean that all organic farms are good for the climate. Not all of them use little energy; some use fossil fuel for heating greenhouses and some use massive amounts of energy for pumping water or simply for intensive mechanical cultivation. Some organic farms do not work as carbon sinks, for example, intensive row crop cultivation is likely to be harmful for soil organic matter. The strength of organic farming is that it is multifunctional, that is, it performs many different services at the same time, like a Swiss army knife – a popular multifunctional tool. But that also means for any particular issue seen in isolation, there will be a better tool. And here there is an inherent danger or challenge. For the market place it is, perhaps, enough to make average statements, but when talk turns to economic compensation for a certain service, e.g. carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation, it is not satisfactory to talk about average performance. By emphasising one aspect of the many sides of organic systems we may lose sight of its other valuable traits. This is a predictable risk when public compensation is introduced with the specific purpose of providing a particular ‘environmental service’ and if standards are tailored to provide that particular service. This effect can already be seen in the various private sector initiatives to make climate standards. The future for the organic sector is more in making the tools mutually supportive rather than increasing the size of the individual tools. This requires systems thinking rather than a narrow focus on one parameter. But the standards, with their increasing level of detail, don’t foster systems thinking at all. And the work of government administrations rarely does as well, as each department has its own very limited responsibility. What to do? Leader of The Organic Standard, April 2012

Very useful resource for agriculture

The Foundation on Future Farming and Biovision have recently launched the new website www.globalagriculture.org. The site makes the IAASTD’s findings available by topics and offers updated figures, background information, further reading and news and includes material on current topics such as land-grabbing and food speculation. Users can also browse and search the original reports. A special page reflects the discussion on food and agriculture on the road to Rio+20.

Thanks for this initiative! 

The dictatorship of intellectual property rights

"At the heart of the defense of modern day capitalism is the view that it is an innovation machine powered by competition and rivalry. In its ambit, the fittest survive and the leanest grow, goes the argument. In practice, however, it is precisely in the area of innovation that capitalism today affords private firms legal monopolies in the form of patents. And such protection is proving increasingly difficult to justify in the context of the huge investments being made by firms in acquiring and hoarding patents (not inventions) and financing litigation costs incurred to defend themselves against patent violation suits." writes C. P. Chandrasekhar in http://triplecrisis.com/patent-truths/

In Garden Earth: I write the following:

Shortly after a large-scale clinical trial in 1955, the first inactivated polio vaccine was being injected into tens of millions of people around the world—possibly the most successful pharmaceutical product launch in history. Asked why he had not obtained a patent on the phenomenally successful vaccine, Jonas Salk reportedly replied, ‘That would be like patenting the sun.’ A few decades later, this view seemed laughably quaint. (Alan Dove, quoted in Science Commons 2010)

Some problems are associated with the fact that nobody owns a certain resource, but certainly greater problems are associated with privatization of common resources such as knowledge, natural resources, innovations and technology. While there might have been secrets of the trade or knowledge that was monopolized also earlier, in no society this was done from the perspective of ownership. At a certain stage society started to protect intellectual property in order to motivate investments by assigning monopoly to certain people who, falsely or rightly, were seen as innovators or originators.
 

In England, patents in the modern sense originated in section 6 of the 1623 Statute on Monopolies, which described patents as ‘monopolies’ and exempted them from the general ban on royal grants of such rights. Mostly intellectual property rights have been established not on the basis of any idea of the ‘rights’ of the originator but rather on the basis of a utilitarian perspective that it is beneficial for society to assign such rights (compare with the discussion on privatization of nature’s resources).[1] It is by protection of the interest of the originator that they will be stimulated to be more creative, innovate and bring to the market new products. Gradually, over the course of history, this perspective was replaced by the notion that rights to control the use and dissemination of information are forms of ‘property’ rights[2] (Fisher 1999). 

The 1790 Copyright Act of the United States established a copyright term of 14 years. Copyrights acquired today will last for the life of the author plus 50 years. A less straightforward but equally important issue is the definition of a copyrighted ‘work’. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, a copyright owner enjoyed little more than protection against verbatim copying of his or her language. So, for example, in 1853 a federal Circuit Court rejected the claim of Harriet Beecher Stowe that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin infringed upon her copyright. Today the story is quite different and the kinds of works to which copyright laws may apply have also grown enormously: in 1884, the Supreme Court concluded that photographs could be copyrighted; in 1971, Congress decided that musical recordings should be shielded from copying. In 1979, computer software was added to the list of protectable works. Like copyright, patent laws were gradually extended. In 1842, hoping to provide ‘encouragement to the decorative arts’, Congress extended the reach of the patent statute to cover ‘new and original designs for articles of manufacture’. Until the early twentieth century, plants were considered products of nature and hence unpatentable. The Plant Patent Act of 1930 overrode this principle, extending a modified form of patent protection to new varieties of asexually reproducing plants. In 1970, Congress went further, reaching new and ‘distinct’ sexually reproducing plant varieties (Fisher 1999).

Half the costs are licensing fees

As the world is getting more and more complex, the tangling web of patents and copyrights is getting more and more impenetrable and it is reasonable to ask which of the original motives for these rights are still valid, if any. Innovation, art and culture all existed before intellectual property rights, and the empirical evidence for the value of them for society is largely missing. If the manufacturing of a product needs a number of components or technologies patented by others, it is a complicated process just to negotiate with all patent holders. Additionally, all the licensing fees have to be paid. One single microchip can ‘contain’ more than 5000 patents; for a cheap DVD player patent costs are as high as manufacturing costs (Wikipedia 2009). In practice, this could mean that good products never reach the market despite both demands from consumers and interest from manufacturers. In the words of economists, a clear ‘market failure’.

The use of the neem tree as a fungicide was patented by an American company, despite that neem has been used as a pesticide for 2000 years. A coalition of the Greens in the European Parliament, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements sued the company to the European Patent Office. After a 10-year-long process, the patent was declared void (IFOAM 2005). At a certain time there were concerns over this kind of bio-piracy, that is, that companies would capitalize on indigenous knowledge. This led to the possibility of patenting that kind of knowledge. Even if the intention was good, it seems as if, ironically, these measures paved the way for exactly what should have been prevented, a privatization of these resources. 

Patent rights can mean that fewer medicines are produced and that they are produced for a higher price, because patent rights limit competition (remember the origin in England in the Statute on Monopolies). A special case is the antiretroviral drugs used for HIV/AIDS. For long the ‘giant pharma’ refused to let generic copies be produced and sold cheaply in low-income countries, which meant that millions didn’t get access to them, again a typical ‘market failure’. In this case, public relations of the pharmaceutical companies ultimately became nightmarish and they backed considerably. It is indisputably the case that a lot of pharmaceutical research would not happen unless there was some protection for the innovation. On the other hand, the research is not necessarily geared towards what is best for the patient or society. There is, for instance, much less interest in drugs that, once and for all, cure an ailment than in those that need to be administered for the rest of your life.

 As can be seen with malaria treatments, there is little private investment in it because the clientele is so poor—which is also the case for why so much public and charity money is spent on this. As well as being an argument for patent rights, the situation with medicinal drugs seems to provide at least equally strong arguments for publicly funded research and common access to the result. For example, the effects of antibiotics are threatened by resistant bacteria. To be able to still treat the growing number of infections with such bacteria, we need to develop antibiotics that are only used as a last resort (so that no bacteria develop resistance against them too). But there is clearly little commercial interest to develop a new antibiotic and then not use it actively. Only governments or other public interest organizations will do that.

(extract from Garden Earth) 


an article in New York Times  writes: 

Another huge barrier to independent inventors is, paradoxically, the system set up to protect them. “The patent system has become rather costly for a small inventor,” says James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law. “Go back 100 years, and patents were very inexpensive to get. You didn’t have to have a lawyer to get one. The system is working in a very different way than it did years ago, and that favors large corporations.”  

---

[1]            Notably, in continental Europe, the perspective of a ‘natural right’ to the originator was more prevalent.

[2]            In a way, the same process has taken place with ownership of land, which was also a common resource that was gradually privatized.

local: the icing of the cake

" Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it. What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing."

Writes Rob Hoskins in a recent blog post about construction, but the analogy is about food and it certainly applies well to food!
 
Earlier, it was the faraway spices and tea that marked luxury, and was largely reserved for the privileged. Today local, organic and artisanal foods are luxury, things just some people can "afford" - because other products are comparatively cheaper. The of free-range chicken, which was the only way to keep chicken 100 years ago, and still the normal way among rural poor - is now a luxury product.

It is also illuminating that the rich, who largely became rich from the profits from the globalised markets, are the ones that to the largest extent are buying the stuff from those producers who work in ways that are less compatible with a global market with endless competition.

Markets don't distribute food to those without money

Seb's maize. Photo Richard Mulonga

The maize is towering over a sea of vigorous weeds. In some cases the greenery has pulled down the stalks and it is almost hard to believe there will be any harvest out of that field. Seb Scott, however, assures me that his maize will yield some 7 tons per hectare. The weeds are actually intentionally planted Lablab beans (Dolichos lablab). Seb is growing maize without machinery; i.e. he and his partner hand-hoe the fields, or just sow by hand in the mulch with an ingenious piece of tube. They also grow organically; instead of using government subsidized fertilizers he use green manure crops to supply nitrogen to his plants.

Some of the Mkandawire children eating their breakfast

Seb is not the only farmer I visit this day in Zambia in the end of April 2012. My first visit went to Fred and Susan Mkandawire. They grow maize on a hectare of land and they harvest a ton, just enough to keep the family alive. Maize is what they eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They don’t starve, but their margins are very small. It seems that they can sell a surplus of 250 kg, worth around 50 dollars this year, which is far from enough for the school fees for the five children. The Mkanadawires are using chemical fertilizers and work totally manually on their farm.

Godfrey Boma and his sunflower, Photo: Richard Mulonga

When he stands next to his great organic sunflowers, it is hard to believe that Godfrey Boma is 81 year old. After all, life expectancy in Zambia is below 40 years. Godfrey is a former miner and small business man who became a farmer at an age where the normal Swede stops working altogether. His and his wife Katherine’s farm is 9 hectares of which 4 hectares are farm land. He uses own oxen for plowing. A better – and more timely - land preparation, better weeding and higher use of chemical fertilizers are all contributing to that he harvest around 5 tons per hectare of maize - more than double the national average. That is five times as much as Fred and Susan, but still less than Seb. 

Godfrey also has a plot of organic production, Instead of the monoculture of maize which is typical for conventional maize production (such as Mkandawire’s and his own) the organic plot has ten different crops in smaller plots or grown together (so called companion cropping). When I asked how organic and non-organic compares, he says: ”It is 50-50. Organic is nice, there are no problems with disease, I don’t use any chemicals and have less cost. But it is more work”.

The visits show that it is possible to increase yields a lot. It is possible to do it with conventional methods and it is possible to do it with organic methods. It is possible to do it in a small scale farm or in a large scale farm. It also shows that poverty, in the sense of limited resources, as for the Mkandawires, is most likely a cause of low productivity in farming, rather than low productivity being the cause of poverty.

Zambia has been used as an example of successful agriculture policy, a proof that with more fertilizers one can produce ”more food”. Perhaps there is limited success on that count, even if the Ministry of agriculture’s own research shows that most of last years high yields crops can be explained by good rains.

Zambia’s agriculture budget is to a very large extent orientated to subsidies of chemical fertilizer and government procurement of maize, to a price considerably above world market prices. And clearly it works in the sense that it results in increased maize production. Anything else would be highly surprising.  Higher prices will lead to higher production, as it pays to use more resources for the same piece of land. As we can see above productivity per hectare can increase with different production methods. Fertilizer probably plays a marginal role for the increase of maize production in Zambia. In 2010/11 Zambia had a bumper crop of maize, and the result is that Zambia has a stock pile of more than 1 million ton, when the new season starts. The minister of agriculture, Emannuel Chenda tells the Post (May 1) that the huge surplus is a challenge, but continues by saying ”I am aware of that potential markets exist beyond our region in places such as the Horn of Africa. He doesn’t seem to understand that there is no shortage of food in the world; the people of the Horn of Africa simply can’t buy it, as little as the poor in Zambia.  The Zambian Farmer reports in their April issue that a very big proportion of the maize stock pile is simply rottening. Approximately a third of the maize in stock has gone to waste in bad storages. The authorities are now burning the rotten maize to make space for the new crop!

Many are critical to the fertilzer support:

”A ‘one size fit all’ approach to fertilizer and seed regardless of differences in agro-ecological zones and soil types has been responsible for poor yields per hectare experienced each year. All farmers are made to plant the same variety or range of seeds (short maturing or medium maturing or long maturing) using same type of fertilizers (D-compound and Urea) despite agriculturists knowing that differences in soil fertility require adjustments in input applications. This has resulted in significant drop in yield against yield potentials to as low as 10 bags per hectare against the potential 50-70 bags.”

says Action Aid in a report.

Daniel Kalala from the Kasisi Agriculture Training Center says that ”fertilizer subsidies is the number 1 election campaign strategy”. Others point to the rampant corruption involved in the program. The Farmer Input Support program costs Zambia 700bn Kwacha per year (some 133 million dollars).  This is enough to buy more than 500,000 ton maize – enough to feed some 2-3 million Zambians. By only supporting maize production with fertilizers and seeds, the government induces bad management practices (mono-culture) as well as bad nutrition of rural families, as they will grow more maize  and less of other crops.

All those issues aside, the story of food and who gets it and who doesn’t has very little to do with agronomic issues or with the use of more GMOs, or more fertilizers. The farms I visited show that it is access to resources (including know how) as well as markets that is most important for the productivity of the land and not if the farm is organic or not. How we farm is still a very important issue for how we maintain and enhance our social and natural capital, When it comes to food, distribution is a much bigger challenge. And distribution, in turn, has a lot to do with markets. And markets don’t distribute food to those that have no money to buy for.  

The monuments of the city are built on the backs of poor rural people

When going from Lusaka towards the farm of Susan Mkandawire we meet a constant stream of guys on bicycles on their way to Lusaka with heavy loads of charcoal. One of them is Christoffer Finsoni on this picture. He is a farmer but earns most of his cash from charcoal making and marketing. He carries 4 bags of 30 kg charcoal on his bicycle some 30 km to the market in Lusaka.

We often here the story about ignorant rural population that destroys their environment by cutting down the trees for cooking. But the reality is a lot more complex. Christoffer and his likes are mainly living in the "organic economy" based on biological and renewable resources. Wood (charcoal) and human power (as in bicycle) are the main energy sources. When I meet him in my car I represent the fossil fuel economy and the global industrial system. What strikes me is the direction of the stream of resources.

Many believe that the stream is from the rich global fossil-fuel economy to the poor, but is it?

Andrews family doesn't use char coal for their cooking, they use fire wood. Char coaling for the market in the city is a bigger threat to their forest land. And who is buying the char coal? Well it is certainly not the poor, they use twigs, corn cobs, stalks and other waste for their cooking. It is rather rich people in the city that drives deforestation. A similar case is the cutting of forests for conversion to grazing land. Most of that meat is destined for rich people. A similar thing is the idea to make bio char from bio mass. Again, poor peoples resources are used to enable the rich to continue a life style that is not sustainable. 

In the same way, the notion that urban living is more environmentally friendly as claimed by many, is just a delusion. The city has always been a parasite on the rural areas and most of the destruction in rural areas are caused by "city life and industrialism". This is based on inequality, privilege and violence.

Keep your ear to the ground!

 

Photo: Richard Mulonga

Susan Mkandawire in Kasisi, Zambia prepares food for her family of seven. Today’s lunch is Nsima. She uses own maize, a bit of cooking oil from the shop, pumkin leaves from her own farm and salt. This is the typical lunch and dinner most days. Breakfast: maize porridge.

 

This is the first job in the project

Keep your ear to the ground!

Which is the title of a book being written by journalist Ann Helen Meyer von Bremenand agriculture consultant and writer Gunnar Rundgren. It is commissioned by the largest environmental NGO in Sweden, the Swedish Society ofNature Conservation (www.snf.se) and will be their yearbook for 2013. 

Breakfast for some of the Mkandawire kids, Photo: Richard Mulonga

The main theme of the book is if it is possible to provide food for a growing population in a sustainable way. The book will look at agriculture development in a global and historical perspective to inform the reader of the forces that shape agriculture – and relate it to our diets and the landscape.  It will describe main challenges for agriculture such as water, erosion, nutrient supply and oversupply, biodiversity and competition between food production with other land-uses, such as bio-energy, conservation and built infrastructure. 

81 year old Godfrey Boma shows me his organic plots. Photo: Richard Mulongo

How agriculture is shaped by forces of technology, markets, policy and demography will be described. Special features will show this in the practice based on visits to countries such as Brazil, the US, India, the Netherlands and Sweden. Not only problems will be highlighted; from each country examples showing a path for a truly sustainable agriculture will be showcased.  

The book will discuss some of the prevalent perceptions or myths about farming and diets such as the need for GMOs and chemical fertilizers, the effect of increasing meat consumption, the effect of the farm frontier expansion. It will also present one or more scenarios for a truly sustainable agriculture.

The work with the book will be done in the period April to November 2012, with the research phase in April to August 2012. It will be published, in Swedish, in December 2012. 

Susan does the heavy hoeing, preparing the land. Fred, the husband cuts the grass with a panga. Photo: Gunnar

The rise of civil society?

Why are we only discussing the state and the market?

The figure tries to depict how various activities have moved from different spheres during the growth of the capitalist society (to the Left) and where they might go in an alternative development (to the Right). With the introduction of capitalism and market economy, many things were moved out from the family, local communities and civil society (the local communities, e.g. the villages, are here seen as part of civil society rather than as part of the state). The role of the state also increased initially: the state organized education, built infrastructure, health care, etc. It also regulated the family and civil society increasingly.

In the later phase of capitalism, more and more has been moved to the market; some aspects of life, like religion, have been relegated to the individual, mainly because they are no longer seen as essential for social order. Civil society organizations have been further weakened, mainly because the market has penetrated most of its space and realm and because of the attitude and values of the market economy. Individualism and competition have not been conducive for civil society.

In the future, we should strive for more activity in the local communities and civil society and less activity in the market sphere as well as in the central government. Also the private sphere should regain some of its relevance, in particular regarding food production and preparation and other household services.
(from Garden Earth)

Your 200 square meters of concrete and asphalt

One of our environmental footprints is the sealed area of the planet:

Uppsala from the south, highways and shopping malls spread on fertile plain, 

Photo: Kolbjörn Örjavik

The total sealed soil surface of the EU area in 2006 was estimated to be around 100 000 km² or 2.3 % of the EU’s territory, with an average of 200 m² per citizen. Member States with high sealing rates (exceeding 5 % of the national territory) are Malta, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg. Furthermore, high sealing rates exist across the EU and include all major urban agglomerations, and most of the Mediterranean coast. The latter experienced a 10 % increase in soil sealing during the 1990s alone.  Assuming an unabated linear trend, we would convert, within a historically very short time frame of just 100 years, an amount of land comparable to the territory of France and Spain combined. Moreover, it is not only the absolute land take figure that matters but the spatial distribution and the value and availability of the land taken. For example, settlement areas cover 5 % of Austria’s total territory, but this figure soars to around 14 % when Alpine areas unsuited to urban or infrastructure development are excluded. When looking at the conversion of agricultural land, land take matters even more as the share of arable land in Austria is about 16 % only. In the case of the Italian Emilia-Romagna Region, some 95 % of the land take between 2003 and 2008 occurred in the fertile plain soils that cover only half of the Region. (from the Guidelines on best practice to limit, mitigate or compensate soil sealing from the EU)

I wrote about this in a post just a few days ago:

Paving the land - and taking it back again

The EU report above has some good recommendations. 

Limiting soil sealing means preventing the conversion of green areas and the subsequent sealing of (part of) their surface. The re-use of already built-up areas, e.g. brownfield sites, can also be included in this concept. Targets have been used as a tool for monitoring as well as spurring progress. Creating incentives to rent unoccupied houses has also helped in limiting soil sealing. Where soil sealing does occur, appropriate mitigation measures have been taken in order to maintain some of the soil functions and to reduce any significant direct or indirect negative effects on the environment and human well-being. These include using, where appropriate, permeable materials instead of cement or asphalt, supporting ‘green infrastructure’, and making wider use of natural water harvesting systems.

But it also introduce another version of of the idea that we can "compensate" or "offset" the effects of our behaviours. So, in a similar way as we can 'offset' our carbon emissions by planting trees in Africa, we can 'compensate' soil sealing: 

"The eco-account system is based on determining the ‘ecological costs’ of development projects involving soil sealing through the attribution of eco-points. Developers have to ensure that compensation measures of equal value are being carried out somewhere else. Ecopoints are acquired at officially authorised compensation agencies, which are responsible for their attribution and redemption and for overseeing the system."

So next step is that we can pay for re-claiming land in Africa for us to continue building high-ways. A strange world indeed.  

Paving the land - and taking it back again

"Restoring to fertility land covered with concrete is an enormous task, but not an impossible one. So, Lorenza Zambon, actress and gardener, tells the story of a couple in Turin, Italy, who decided to give to their children a patch of fertile land as a gift. It was a lot of work; concrete had to be cut and broken to pieces and the rubble carried away. Then, restoring the fertility of the soil took truckloads of dirt, charcoal, and more. Zambon doesn't tell us how long the task took nor how much it cost, but surely it was slow, messy and expensive. It was also a subversive idea: in the generally accepted view, paving the land means "developing" it, and that means making money. So, destroying property to restore the fertile soil is something that nobody in his/her right mind would - normally - do."

writes Ugo Bardi on his blog post about the increasing encroachment on agriculture land by roads, houses etc. It is very hard to get accurate data for exactly how much land is paved over or "built" in the world. Data from Denmark looks like this. 

Danish land use (ministry of environment 2004)

 4.1 %, 4.3 % and 4.4 % of the EU territory was classified as artificial surface in 1990, 2000 and 2006 respectively. This corresponds to a 8.8 % increase of artificial surface in the EU between 1990 and 2006. In the same period, population increased by only 5 %. In 2006 each EU citizen disposed of 389 m² of artificial surfaces, which is 3.8 % or 15 m² more compared to 1990. Unsustainable land use trends can be observed in Cyprus, Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal where land take is growing considerably faster than population growth. Furthermore, there are several new Member States also affected by unsustainable land use trends due to continuing land take and at the same shrinking populations. Policy targets for land take. Quantitative limits for annual land take exist only in six Member States: Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In all cases the limits are indicative and are used as monitoring tools. This can be read in a recent EU report. I write more about this report in the post EU farm land increasingly sealed. 

In Garden Earth I write:

Roads and petrol stations—the crops of the modern times

The statistical basis for assessing how much land human beings have taken in direct use for buildings, roads, etc., is surprisingly weak. Literature quote figures from 1.5% up to 9%. In Sweden 3%, 1.29 million hectares of the land, is built on in some way. Land for housing was 29% of this; roads, railroads and airports 31%; industries, etc. 11%. Of course, Sweden is sparsely populated. In the county of Stockholm 15% of the land is built upon whereas in the northernmost county of Norrbotten only 0.6% of land is built upon. There were 550,000 kilometres of roads (some 60 metres per person) covering 345,000 hectares of land (SCB 2004). In the more densely populated Denmark, human infrastructure is calculated to cover almost 20% of the land area (Danish Ministry of Environment 2005). During the 1960s, 7% of European farm area was encroached upon by roads and 15% of the agriculture land of Great Britain was built upon (Montgomery 2007). By 2010, the United States lost almost 10 million hectares, more than 2.5% of farmland, to human infrastructure since 1950 (Talberth et al. 2007). Eastern United States has a larger proportion of its total area (4–5%) in urban and suburban landscapes than in other regions (H. John Heinz III Center 2008).

We need to do something with the ongoing encroachment of agriculture land by built infrastructure. It is scandalous that soils are not protected by any international conventions. As far as I understand it is not even on the agenda in the upcoming Rio + 20 meeting.
Time for a soil convention!

Update 19 April:
Apparently the EU Commission released some guidelines about "soil sealing"
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/soil/pdf/soil_sealing_guidelines_en.pdf
and there is an upcoming conference about it:
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/soil/conference_may2012.htm 

Growing with love and care, Organic agriculture grows in Africa

Growing with love and care, Organic agriculture grows in Africa

 ‘Organic agriculture is extremely important in human life. The food we eat today is grown without real love and care for human life’, says Zambia's First Republican President Kenneth Kaunda, one of the prominent speakers at the 2nd African Organic Conference in Lusaka, Zambia. The conference will attract some 300 participants from more than 40 countries and four continents.

 Organic agriculture in Africa is growing rapidly. More than 1 million hectares of arable land and at least 530,000 farmers are certified, according to organic standards in Africa. Uganda and Ethiopia have each more than 100,000 certified organic farms and Tanzania some 85,000. Most of the certified organic production is sold for exports, but there are good organic markets in South Africa and Egypt and emerging markets in countries such as Senegal and Kenya. Many more farmers, from Morocco to Madagascar, from Cairo to Cape Town, practice organic farming for the benefit of local communities and the environment.
From being ignored or even oppressed by government, organic farming is increasingly recognized for its contribution to food security, poverty alleviation and the environments.
The President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, told delegates at COP 17 in Durban in December:

‘Several studies show that the use of organic methods of farming by small producers in developing countries can lead to an increase in crop yields and thus enhance food security among the poor. Sustainable crop and livestock systems provide ecosystem services that restore productivity, conserve soil, water and biodiversity, take away carbon, regulate climate and provide landscape and cultural values.’ 

The Executive Council of the African Union has recently adopted a decision on organic farming. The decision calls for the establishment of an African organic farming platform based on available best practices.  

The conference in Lusaka 2-4 May, provides an opportunity to showcase the contribution that organic agriculture already makes and discuss how it can be scaled up to meet the combined needs of more food production, maintaining the environment and increasing income. ‘It makes us proud that Zambia is becoming a pioneer in climate-smart agriculture. Our expectations are that the conference will be a practical learning and implementation experience.’ said Munshimbwe Chitalu, OPPAZ chief executive officer. Topics addressed range from organic policies and action plans, private sector initiatives, research and options for cooperation on organic standards in Africa. Research findings and studies of best practises form a major part of the conference. The full programme is available at

http://africanorganicconference.com/images/docs/aoc2_draft_programme_rev4.1.pdf

 

 The Second African Organic Conference Mainstreaming organic agriculture in the African development agenda will take place in Lusaka, Zambia, from May 2 to 4, 2012.
The conference is organized by the Organic Producers and Processors Association of Zambia (OPPAZ) in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of Zambia, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Grow Organic Africa under the auspices of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement (IFOAM) and the African Union. Registration is open until 10 April at

 http://africanorganicconference.com/index.php/registration

More information at www.africanorganicconference.com.

 Contacts:

 Munshimbwe Chitalu, OPPAZ, gmchitalu@gmail.com, tel. +260-21-1263 070

 Gunnar Rundgren, Grow Organic Africa, gunnar@grolink.se, tel. + 46 70 518 0290

 Hervé Bouagnimbeck, IFOAM, h.bouagnimbeck@ifoam.org, +49-228-92650-23

 Sophia Twarog, UNCTAD, s ophia.twarog@unctad.org, tel. +41 22 917 5082

-------------------------------------extended information--------------------------------------

 What is organic agriculture?

 Organic agriculture is a production system based on active agro-ecosystem management rather than on external inputs. It builds on traditional agriculture and utilizes both traditional and scientific knowledge. Certified or uncertified, organic agriculture offers a wide range of food security, economic, environmental and social benefits.

Organic agriculture builds soil fertility and structure by restoring carbon and nutrients to the soil through sustainable land and water management techniques such as composting, cover crops, mulching and crop rotation. This can help African crops reach their full potential of yielding two to four times more than they currently do. 

 Research shows that organic agriculture is a good option for food security in Africa – equal or better than most conventional systems and more likely to be sustainable in the longer term. An analysis of 114 cases in Africa revealed that a conversion of farms to organic or near-organic production methods increased agricultural productivity of 116 per cent. Moreover, a shift towards organic production systems has enduring impact, as it builds up levels of natural, human, social, financial and physical capital in farming communities.

•     Under the Environmental Action Team project in Kenya, maize yields increased by 71 per cent and bean yields by 158 per cent. Moreover, increased diversity in food crops available to farmers resulted in more varied diets and thus improved nutrition.
•      For 20,000 farmers in Tigray, previously one of the most degraded regions of Ethiopia, crop yields of major cereals and pulses have almost doubled through the use of ecological agricultural practices such as composting, water and soil conservation activities, agroforestry and crop diversification.
•      In Uganda, an in-depth study of 331 farmers found that those engaged in certified organic export production had significantly higher incomes than their conventional counterparts. Conversion to organic was fairly easy, involved little risk and required few, if any, fixed investments. The organic households became more food-secure due to higher incomes.

 More resources:

 Reports from earlier conferences

http://africanorganicconference.com/index.php/resources-and-downloads

 FAO web site for organic agriculture

http://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-home/en/

 IFOAM Africa Office

http://www.ifoam.org/about_ifoam/around_world/africa.html

 UNCTAD policy brief and other resources

http://archive.unctad.org/en/docs/presspb20086_en.pdf

 President Zuma’s speech:

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=5431

(this is a press release for the conference, I am much involved in the organization of it)

We are people through other people

What Drives Us?
We are people through other people (Bantu proverb)

Homo economicus and Homo geneticus

Two widespread perceptions or theories interpret or explain all human efforts and motivation from one single factor. One is socio-biology, which sees human agency as just a reflection of the selfish interest of genes to multiply, and the other is economicism and the invisible hand, which interprets all human actions as motivated by economic stimuli; that is, all traits that are ‘profitable’ will be chosen and will ultimately dominate. These two theories are not contradictory. Socio-biology is perhaps more applicable at the private level and economicism at the societal level. The more extreme proponents of both theories try toexplain all human behaviours with their respective theory, for instance that we chose partners on the basis of economic considerations alone.

Socio-biologists, with some support from the theory of natural selection, consider egoism of genes to be the engine of all developments and actions. They don’t deny that people can act altruistic but explain altruism as something that is driven by egoism in the first place.The fact that young men waste their genes as canon feed in a meaningless war—or in a dignified battle for freedom for that matter—is explained by the fact that they (or rather their DNA) can ‘count’ on the genes of their sisters being spread and, in such way, their own genes can live along. Or some other far-fetched explanation. 

That the world is not filled by rapists cannot be well explained by this theory but can well be understood with a societal perspective of human beings. If the desire for rape were genetic, only through a systematic killing of the infants born out of rape could it be contained, especially if there were no societal mechanisms against it (and such an infanticide would again be a societal response). Socio-biologists also fail to explain why women in high-income countries don’t have so many children. They could manage to raise four, and well up to ten, children and all would survive, spreading their genes much more effectively than with the current two children. Despite all these objections, it is quite clear that many human actions can be explained on rather simple evolutionary grounds—anything else would be sensational.

Simpleton economicists and their popularizers want to explain all human actions by economic drivers. Also, many Marxists tend to see the acts of different groups to be fully dependent on their economic standing in relation to as opposed to production factors—here the concept of ‘class’ is critical. The reasoning goes from self-evident things to very cumbersome explanatory models. History shows that economic motives and personal gain were in no way important drivers before capitalism. Material wealth has, for sure, always been attractive, but social status and power have always been more important. And economic wealth was not the route to these; many cultures despised trade and entrepreneurship. 

The basic error is the perception that economic drivers are superior to all other drivers and that all other drivers can be ‘translated’ into money. If one studies certain periods in history one might indeed get this impression. The strength in the reasoning is that the economic driver is a forceful paradigm with many self-reinforcing loops. And as a society is built along this paradigm, human beings consciously and subconsciously create a world that rewards exactly this; in such a way it becomes self-fulfilling. But this is not truer than the statement that the most important driver for human development is the ability of an individual to throw a spear farther than anyone else. This ability was most likely very important in a hunter society or a war society, much more important than the ability to amass wealth.

Even the liberal economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (2001) notes in his famous The Road to Serfdom, an attack on both fascism and socialism, that the ultimate objectives of a rational person are never economic; that there is no ‘economic motive’, but only economic factors that influence our ability to achieve other goals. Another version of economicism is the idea of ‘rational choice’ , that is, the idea that one can find a rational explanation to all human deeds. Also, this idea is to some extent totally self-evident and totally meaningless in the sense that irrational choices most certainly will lead to failure in the long run as this is more or less the definition of ‘irrational’; if it is successful it isn’t irrational . . .

The arguments of the economists and socio-biologists can complement each other and don’t necessarily contradict each other. Also, the economists and socio-biologists are often the same people, or the same people use their arguments alike. If economic wealth also leads to higher levels of reproduction, they most certainly complement each other. While there are some indications that success is attractive, it doesn’t seem to translate into rich people or rich societies having more children than poor people or poor societies. Modern population patterns seem to support a totally opposite view. The poor have more children and today they also have more surviving children. Both theories forget the importance of the social and cultural context.

We are tamed by culture

Many look towards animals for guidance on which behaviours are ‘natural’, with the

understanding that what is ‘natural’ is good or right or, at least, inevitable. And, for sure, many interesting parallels exist between human and animal behaviour. But the search in nature for examples of certain behaviours is often coloured by what people want to see. For some reason, many tends to look a lot more towards chimpanzees than bonobos. Both species are equally close to human beings, so why are comparisons drawn mainly with the aggressive chimpanzees? Chimps live in aggressive patriarchates whereas bonobos live in matriarchates, using sex for social interaction and conflict resolution. While social hierarchies do exist among bonobos, rank plays a less prominent role than in other primate societies. Isn’t it so that human beings project what they want to see in the examples they seek? Space doesn’t allow any major digression into gender, but if there is any area where the most meaningless comparisons with nature are made, it is here. Even human reproduction is described in terms of male activity and female passivity, while reality might be quite different.

Nature has such diversity that one can find almost any behaviour there.The long adolescence of a human being is long and slow for a (evolutionary) reason. Whileone can envision human beings growing up in a few years, like horses or cows, or in half a year, like dogs or pigs, in reality human beings need a lot more time. A newborn chimp’s brain weighs around 60% of a grown-up chimp’s brain, whereas a newborn human’s brain weighs just 24% of an adult human’s brain (Gärdenfors 2003). It takes human beings some 12–18 years to grow up, and this time frame seems to get longer as society becomes more and more complex. Humankind has to learn so many things and, more importantly, human beings need to be ‘socialized’. Some even qualify the human brain as a bio-cultural organ (Weltzer 2011), with layers of accumulated cultural learning. Through culture, society harnesses and adapts some genetic heritage.

For instance, let us look at reproduction. In almost all cultures, human beings wait to reproduce long after they reach sexual maturity; in many societies, parents try—admittedly, sometimes unsuccessfully—to control their offspring’s choice of mate. Most rules and customs in society are mainly about the preservation of society and not so much about biology. Ultimately, behaviours that are taught must, in the end, be considered as ‘natural’ as other behaviours that are more clearly genetically conditioned, and they areas much or as little ‘good’ as behaviours that are genetically conditioned. Society andculture are a part of the human species. Without society, without culture, without the mastering of fire or without language (which is a very good example of a social innovationthat is essentially human), we are simply not human beings one is simply not a human being. 

Therefore, the argument that genetically conditioned behaviours are more important or more ‘real’ than culturally conditioned behaviours is a denial of humanity. This is not incontradiction to the survival of the genes because human genes are most common with those of the family, then with those of society and, finally, with those of humanity at large. It is also not in contradiction to the human quest for utility as individuals, which the

economists claim is the predominant force. Human society and cultures recognize both behaviours but have always reined in their forces.

Mutual aid

The Russian geographer, and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) in response to ‘social Darwinism’ and, in particular, to Darwin’s supporter Thomas H. Huxley’s essay ‘The struggle for existence in human society’ (1891), where Huxley applied Darwin’s observations to human society, citing ‘survival of the fittest’ as the predominant force in shaping human society and development. Kropotkin was strongly against Huxley’s perspective. He supported Darwin’s theories about natural selection, but believed that, at least in Huxley’s version, it overemphasized the struggle between individuals of the same species. Kropotkin looked at other animals, but in particular at human society, and claimed that mutual aid is an important principle both in nature and in human development. He cited the cooperation in mediaeval cities, in village communities and workers’ cooperatives as successful examples of mutual aid. He showed how such self-organized voluntary systems operated the fisheries in the Caspian Sea, the Volga and the Urals.

And today, open-source software development is a good example of the successful application of mutual aid. ‘Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph notbecause cooperation is morally right or software “hoarding” is morally wrong . . . , but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem’ (Raymond 2000).

Recently, Sloan Wilson (2003) showed the importance of human cooperation (among others in the form of religion) in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. He gives an example to better understand how ‘groups’ or ‘societies’ can be ‘adaptive units’, that is, subject to ‘laws’ of evolution at the level of the group and not only at the level of the individual. Males of some species can kill infants in order to mate with the mothers. This would be, and is, a successful reproduction strategy for them, but not for the mothers, the infants, the group or the species. Human beings (human society) have a moral revulsion against such practice and the person trying it would be excluded from the group. Such a group would be better adapted and more successful than a group that did not have such moral codes. In this way, moral systems have evolved by group selection to suppress self-serving (but group-damaging) behaviours. Sloan Wilson notes, however, that ‘those groups of males who do not kill each other’s offspring might well kill the offspring and appropriate the females from other groups’ (2003: 38). This puts the solidarity of us our own group (people, tribes whatever category) and our hostility

towards ‘the other’ in an understandable evolutionary context. One can lift the discussionone level higher though, where the survival of the entire species depends on the human ability to adapt to new situations (such as climate change). Such a situation would then assign adaptive group properties to the whole species and be a ground for universalism.

All these are just examples of  that societies also are evolutionary, adaptive organisms, where the cooperation of individuals are almost as important as the cooperation of cells within the body.

The unit of survival is not the individual

Perhaps it would have been wiser or better to have grown a thick fur than to have built houses, and to have developed more body fat and flippers to swim better, but that was not the adaptive response of humankind. I venture that the speed of human development and the complexity of human society don’t allow for a sufficiently rapid genetic adaptation of the individual. Gregory Bateson says: ‘the unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment’ (2000: 457). I believe that ‘environment’ should here be understood to encompass ecosystems,

but also culture and society; all of these work together as adaptive responses, and it is only by taking care of all of them that one we can meet the challenges of the future.

The usual suspects...

Green growth sounds nice, but can it deliver?

"The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones "

John Maynard Keynes

A new UNCTAD Discussion Paper (No. 205) written by Ulrich Hoffmann reviews the fallacies of green growth in coping with climate change and the implications for development space.The main results of the analysis can be summarized as follows: Many economists and policy makers advocate a fundamental shift towards “green growth” as the new, qualitatively-different growth paradigm, based on enhanced material/resource/energy efficiency and drastic changes in the energy mix. “Green growth” may work well in creating new growth impulses with reduced environmental load and facilitating related technological and structural change. But can it also mitigate climate change at the required scale (i.e. significant, absolute and permanent decline of GHG emissions at global level) and pace?  

The UNCTAD Discussion Paper argues that growth, technological, population-expansion and governance constraints as well as some key systemic issues cast a very long shadow on the “green growth” hopes. 

The focus on green growth is largely a re-packing of the 25 years old sustainable development, of which we heard a lot but seen very little. It may rather give excuses to do nothing really fundamental that can bring about a U-turn of global GHG emissions. The proponents of a resource efficiency revolution (called eco-efficiency, factor 4 or factor 10 or lately simply green growth) need to scrutinize the historical evidence, in particular the combined effects of economic and population growth.

 Furthermore, they need to realize that the required transformation goes beyond innovation and structural changes to include democratization of the economy and cultural change. 

 Climate change calls into question the global equality of opportunity for prosperity (i.e. ecological justice and development space) and is thus a huge developmental challenge for the South and a question of life and death for some developing countries, and a question of global solidarity for the others.

The paper is available at:
http://www.unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/osgdp2011d5_en.pdf 

The paper is welcome and its origin in a UN organization gives it high credibility.

Read more:

Eco-efficiency and de-coupling are not delivering
Poverty, Property and Profit
Jackson's Cinderella economy
Green Economy a win-win-win?

 Now, this should not be taken as if I would be against all the good new green innovations, such as organic farming, solar energy, electric cars etc. But it is important to realize that our challenges go beyond what can be fixed with a few technological changes and consumer choice in a market economy. This is clearly seen in the case of organic farming. It has grown tremendously in the last 25 years, but still only represent one percent of the global food market. The underlying drivers of the capitalist economy works in the other direction, and the consumers who pay extra for organic products are paying for market failures in the lingo of neo-liberals, but I would call it policy failure or even more dramatic:

systems failure. game over

 

 

growth is the religion of capitalism

There is no land left to settle, the last frontier we have left to civilize is ourselves.
(Jewel Kilcher, from the album cover of This Way, 2001)

In nature, some species are pioneers or colonizers; they are the first to invade ‘new’ lands, such as land created by lava from a volcano, the land after a forest fire, the naked land after a mudslide or other kind of erosion or land rising from the sea. These species prepare the land for a richer life. Normally, they are specialists in living on limited nutrients, such as lichens and moss. Human beings are also a kind of colonizer, even if certainly not the first ones to take new land into possession. The Swedish psychiatrist Nils Uddenberg (1993), in his book Ett djur bland alla andra?, writes that ‘the colonization stage of humanity is over. There is no new land to conquer; we have to learn how to live from the land we already have. Other paradigms have to replace the pioneer mentality.’.

This train of thought is not at all shared by those who see how the restless energy of capitalism constantly expands our world. ‘The conquest of the air may well be more important than the conquest of India was—we must not confuse geographical frontiers with economic ones,’ says Schumpeter (1942: 117), and his words are repeated today by almost all defenders of the existing system. In a limited sense he was correct; the airline industry perhaps has the same gross output as the GDP of India, and if it doesn’t, one can throw in the mobile networks, radio and television, all using the air for the service they provide.

But Schumpeter was also wrong because he didn’t see that the economy is a subsystem of nature and not the other way round. Although it is true that economic, geographic or biological limits should not be mixed up, this doesn’t mean that the economy can move any of the other limits. It just means that when one has reached the limit, expansion will have to take place somewhere else, which is exactly what is happening all the time and which is why capitalism is based on colonization and not on living within limits. Which is also why growth is the religion of capitalism, without it, it will crumble.
(Extract from Garden Earth)