Oxfam Food Policy & Sustainable Development
June 1st, 2011
Oxfam has started a new campaign to reorient food policy to become more sustainable and to serve the needs of consumers including the approximately one billion people who are malnourished and have inadequate diets. The world sustainability summit is coming up next year and it seems that again there has been little done to meet sustainability goals. Only the economic slow-down of the recession has mitigated some development, but very little proactive work has been done. It seems that nations with rainforests are jockeying to get carbon sequestering funds while they blithely go about destroying habitat and ignore the needs of indigenous people. The world is reaching some kind of crisis point where development in an unplanned chaotic manner is no longer sustainable, no longer justifiable and is no longer even the most efficient manner of resource exploitation.
Time for some serious planning with mechanisms put in place to insure that the corporations, or nations can no longer simply ignore the good of the planet overall. Question is who will step up and take charge? If a democratic socialist world government is established then there will be a legitimate basis for policy and planning. Or at least a UN with greatly enhanced powers and some form of direct popular vote in the UN would be a mechanism that would involve us all as a planetary body. We have the technology, where is the will?
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From Terraviva
WORLD: Tropical Forest Summit Opens
By Arsène Séverin*
BRAZZAVILLE, May 31, 2011 (IPS) - Heads of state from the Amazon, Congo and Borneo-Mekong basins are meeting in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville: leaders hope to reach an accord on sound management of valuable rainforest ecoystems, but civil society actors believe the problems faced by local populations may be ignored.
The host of the meeting, the president of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, said the summit constitutes a final "decisive step" before the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development which will take place in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. According to organisers, the Brazzaville summit will also allow the reinforcing of South-South cooperation; the Congolese environment minister, Henri Djombo, told reporters the objective was to ask all the countries involved to form a united bloc.
Worldwide worries
Ahead of the summit, forest policy in several countries came under the spotlight. In Brazil, the government is considering a controversial revision to its Forest Code, which if passed by the Senate, will expand the amount of forest that is threatened by deforestation. The same day that the lower house of Brazil's legislature approved the code, forest defenders José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo, were shot to death by as-yet unknown assailants. The two had received death threats for their activism against illegal logging in the northern Amazon state of Par".
The loosening of protections for forests in Brazil comes at the same time as satellite data revealed that forest losses in March and April 2011 were at least five times greater than during the same period last year. Nearly 600 square kilometres of forest were destroyed in these two months, the damage attributed to ranchers and soy farmers.
In Indonesia, a moratorium on the issuing of new permits to clear forests belatedly went into force on May 19, freezing proposed logging or conversion of some 64 million hectares of peatland and primary forest according to a report in the Jakarta Globe. But the measure - which included exemptions for permits already agreed in principle, extensions to existing permits, and for projects linked to production of sugar, rice or energy - has been criticised by activists.
"This is a bitter disappointment," Paul Winn of Greenpeace Australia-Pacific told the paper. "It will do little to protect Indonesia's forests and peatlands. Seventy-five percent of the forests purportedly protected by this moratorium are already protected under existing Indonesian law, and the numerous exemptions further erode any environmental benefits."
Greenpeace elsewhere raised concerns that timber certified as sustainably harvested by the Forest Stewardship Council in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere did not meet the required standards. A May 27 press release specifically cited two companies operating in the DRC, Société de Développement Forestier and Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, for damaging valuable areas intended to be left undisturbed and for violating human rights in the provinces of Bandundu and Equateur.
Prioritise people
Reached by phone, the minister for communication for the provincial government of Equateur Province, Rebecca Ebale-Nguma, said she had appealed to the government in Kinshasa to take advantage of the Brazzaville summit to take note of the problems of the population in this forested region.
"In Lisala, in Mbandaka and at Basankusu (in the north of DRC) for example, the population see tremendous wealth leave the province in the form of timber, but live in extreme poverty," said Ebale-Nguma.
"Entire cities here - in Equateur - are without clinics or schools."
The Republic of Congo's environment minister said the ten countries of the Congo Basin have between them drawn up a plan for convergence over the management of their forest ecosystems. "There can be some differences, but these will not compromise the overall plan," said Djombo.
But numerous civil society groups in the Congo Basin and beyond believe the summit will fail to take into account the problems facing forest communities and indigenous peoples.
"The participation and consultation of the people affected does not seem to be taken seriously," said Indra van Gisbergen, a member of the Forest European Resources Network. "There must be real access to information and awareness campaigns for these people."
For van Gisbergen, the Brazzaville summit will be more about the commercialisation of carbon than the good of the people. "It is clear from reading the draft declaration and cooperation agreement, that the emphasis is on promoting the carbon market and financing emission reductions via the market," she told IPS.
In a position paper published ahead of the summit, the Congo Basin Network, based in Cameroon, expressed its indignation over the direction indicated in draft documents.
"Given that the outcome of this summit will be very influential, our organisations are calling on heads of state to not give priority to carbon trading with regards to the REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) process," Roch Euloge N'zobo, one of the spokespersons for the network, told IPS.
Maixent Fortuné Hanimbat, another member of the Congo Basin Network, said the draft documents do not clearly define a role for civil society in following up the recommendations of the summit.
Representatives of indigenous pygmy communities are also complaining. "Our association of indigenous people does not even know how to register. Once again, we will be present, but not to give our point of view," said Jean Nganga, president of the Association for the Defence and Promotion of Indigenous Peoples, based in Brazzaville.
"Perhaps we will be the most significant absentees from this event."
* Terna Gyuse in Cape Town contributed to this report.
http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=55866
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UN Division for Sustainable Development
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/index.shtml?utm_source=OldRedirect&utm_medium=redirect&utm_content=dsd&utm_campaign=OldRedirect
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From Barcelona Field Studies Centre
Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to China
By JANE PERLEZ New York Times
Published: April 29, 2006
LONG ALONGO, INDONESIA— For as long as anyone can remember, Anyie Apoui and his people have lived among the majestic trees and churning rivers in an untouched corner of Borneo, catching fish and wild game, cultivating rice and making do without roads. But all that is about to change.
The Indonesian government has signed a deal with China that will level much of the remaining tropical forests in an area so vital it is sometimes called the lungs of Southeast Asia.
For China, the deal is a double bounty: the wood from the forest will provide flooring and furniture for its ever-expanding middle class, and in its place will grow vast plantations for palm oil, an increasingly popular ingredient in detergents, soaps and lipstick.
The forest-to-palm-oil deal, one of an array of projects that China said it would develop in Indonesia as part of a $7 billion investment spree last year, illustrates the increasingly symbiotic relationship between China's need for a wide variety of raw materials, and its Asian neighbors' readiness to provide them, often at enormous environmental cost.
For Mr. Anyie and his clan, the deal will bring jobs and the opportunity for a modern life. "We love our forest, but I want to build the road for my people — I owe it to them," said Mr. Anyie, 63, an astute elder of the Dayak people. "We've had enough of this kind of living."
From Indonesia to Malaysia to Myanmar, many of the once plentiful forests of Southeast Asia are already gone, stripped legally or illegally, including in the low-lying lands here in Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo. Only about half of Borneo's original forests remain.
Those forests that do remain, like the magnificent stands here in Mr. Anyie's part of the highlands, are ever pressed, ever prized and ever more valuable, particularly as China's economy continues its surge.
Over all, Indonesia says it expects China to invest $30 billion in the next decade, a big infusion of capital that contrasts with the declining investment by American companies here and in the region.
Much of that Chinese investment is aimed at the extractive industries and infrastructure like refineries, railroads and toll roads to help speed the flow of Indonesia's plentiful coal, oil, gas, timber and palm oil to China's ports.
In one of the latest deals, on April 19, Indonesia announced that China had placed a $1 billion rush order for a million cubic yards of a prized reddish-brown hardwood, called merbau, to be used in construction of its sports facilities for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Merbau wood, mostly prevalent in Papua's virgin forests, has been illegally logged and shipped to China since the late 1990's, stripping large swathes of forest in the Indonesian province on the western side of the island of New Guinea.
The decision to award a $1 billion concession to China will "increase the deforestation of Papua," a place of extraordinary biodiversity, said Elfian Effendy, executive director of Greenomics, an Indonesian environmental watchdog. "It's not sustainable."
The plan for palm oil plantations on Borneo was signed during a visit by the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to Beijing last July.
Under pressure from environmental groups, the Indonesian environment and forestry ministries have come out against the plan. The coordinating minister for economic affairs, who goes by the single name Boediono, said in April that he was still weighing the pros and cons of executing the entire plan.
The commander of the Indonesian military, Gen. Djoko Suyanto, whose forces are heavily involved in Indonesia's illegal forestry businesses, strongly backed the plan during a visit to the border region in March.
Certainly, there are profits to be made. Major consumer companies like Procter & Gamble say they are using more palm oil in their products instead of crude oil; palm oil is favored for cooking by the swelling Chinese middle class, and it is being explored as an alternative fuel.
Indonesia's environmentalists, and some economists, say chopping down as much as 4.4 million acres of the last straight-stemmed, slow-growing towering dipterocarp trees on Borneo would gravely threaten this region's rare ecosystem for plants, animals and people.
Maps for the project have aroused fears that it would encroach into the forest in Kayan Mentarang National Park, where the intoxicating mix of high altitude and equatorial humidity breeds an exceptional diversity of species, second only to Papua's, biologists say.
The area is the source of 14 of the 20 major rivers on Borneo, and the destruction of the forests would threaten water supplies to coastal towns, said Stuart Chapman, a director at the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia.
For years, Mr. Anyie, the Dayak elder, said he had resisted offers from commercial contractors to cut down the forest around his village, next to the park.
He worked hard, too, to keep the old ways of life, which until 40 years ago included forays into headhunting, he said, showing visitors the skull of a Malaysian soldier stowed in his attic, a souvenir from the 1965 border war with Malaysia.
But now it is time for change, he said. "People have told me, `Wood is gold, you're still too honest,' " said Mr. Anyie, a diminutive man with brush-cut black hair.
His own grown children have deserted the village for big towns, and the villagers left behind are tired of traveling everywhere by foot (three days to neighboring Malaysia where jobs in palm oil plantations are plentiful) or by traditional long boats powered by anemic 10-horsepower engines.
For those seeking to visit, the journey is just as arduous. The area can be reached only by light plane, a pummeling voyage over rapids in a wooden canoe and then a trek through tangles of trees and creepers.
A three-day stay at a research station deep inside the forest told what is at stake for the ecosystem, first documented by Charles Darwin's colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, in an account in the late 1850's called "The Malay Archipelago."
Wild mango trees, tropical oaks, pale-trunked myrtles, sago palms, rattan trees and pandanas with shiny leaves like long prongs crowded the hills that rise almost vertically above the river.
Exceedingly tall and elegant dipterocarps towered over all, their green canopies filtering shards of occasional sunlight. Underfoot, tiny dew-encrusted green mosses, still damp in the afternoon, clung to rocks, and miniature versions of African violets poked their mauve flowers just above the ground.
Wildlife abounds, said Stephan Wulffraat, 39, a Dutch conservation biologist and the director of the research station run by the World Wildlife Fund. The forest is home to seven species of leaf monkeys, he said, and at high noon, a crashing sound high in the trees announced a group's arrival. A red-coated deer made a fleeting appearance and dashed off.
On the gloomy forest floor, Mr. Wulffraat, who fends off leeches by tucking his pant legs into knee-length football socks, has set more than a dozen camera traps to photograph wild creatures too shy to appear.
Three years ago, an animal the size of a large cat with a bushy tail with a reddish fur sauntered by the camera. Mr. Wulffraat, a seven-year veteran of the forest, said that the animal resembled a civet, but he added that he and other experts believed that it was an entirely new species.
The discovery of a species of mammal like a civet is unusual, but dozens of new species of trees, mosses and herbs, butterflies, frogs, fresh water prawns and snakes have all been found since the station opened in 1991, he said. "This field station has more frogs and snake species around than in all of Europe," Mr. Wulffraat said.
Until now, the forests at these higher elevations have been protected by their sheer inaccessibility. To get back to the coast from the research station, for instance, takes a 15-hour journey along a 350-mile stretch of the Bahau and Kayan Rivers in a wooden longboat powered by three outboard motors.
In contrast, the forests in lowland Kalimantan, where roads have been hacked into the land already, are so ravaged by logging that they will have disappeared by 2010, the World Bank says.
As the roads start penetrating the area of Mr. Anyie's clan, the upland forests will begin to disappear here, too. The solution is to adopt sustainable management plans, Mr. Wulffraat said.
Such plans allow logging only in specially certified areas, he said. But so far, he said, they have proved a losing proposition.
"In about 30 years," Mr. Anyie said, "the forest will be gone
http://geographyfieldwork.com/TropicalRainforestExploitation1.htm
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From Civil Eats
Starting a New Conversation on Fair Food »
GROWing a movement
Food Policy
Take Action
June 1st, 2011 By Vicky Rateau
The movement for reform to our flawed food system is growing stronger every day. Cooks, consumers, and campaigners alike are waking up in increasing numbers to the dangerous and unsustainable impacts of the way much of our food is grown, sold, and consumed.
This progress could not come at a more important moment. Our global food system works only for the few–for most of us it is broken. It leaves consumers lacking sufficient power and knowledge about what we buy and eat and almost a billion people hungry worldwide, millions of whom live here in the U.S.
The failure of the system flows from failures of government–failures to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest–which mean that companies, interest groups, and elites are able to plunder our resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food to suit themselves.
And now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: Vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes and devastating weather events that catch us somehow unaware and unprepared. Behind each of these slow-burn crises continue to smolder creeping and insidious climate change; growing inequality, chronic hunger, and vulnerability; and the erosion of our natural resources. The broken food system is both a driver of this fragility and highly vulnerable to it.
But all of this can change and in fact it already is. Today Oxfam is launching our new campaign GROW. GROW is a campaign for the billions of us who eat food and the one and a half billion men and women who produce it. GROW is a campaign for a better future where we expose and overcome the threats we face and help build movements for a new era of prosperity.
This better future is one where we grow what we need, so everyone has enough to eat, always. Getting there will take all the energy, ingenuity, and political will that humankind can muster. We must mount powerful campaigns to win significant transformations in how our society faces common threats and manages scarce resources.
GROW may be ambitious, but we seek practical changes on the substantive issues that keep poor people hungry. We will campaign for investments in small-scale food producers to increase their productivity, self-reliance, climate resilience, and economic opportunity. We will campaign for an end to excessive speculation in agricultural commodities that drives food price spikes. We will campaign to modernize food aid so that 50 cents of every dollar is no longer wasted serving industry lobbyists ahead of hungry people and the American taxpayer. We will campaign to stop giveaways to the corn-ethanol industry that drive up food prices. We will campaign to regulate land and water grabs to instill much needed transparency and sanity into global land deals.
Our targets are the powerful elites in poor countries that seize land and block reform; the special interest lobbies of rich countries that tip the playing field against small farmers on the backs of taxpayers; the multinational traders who profit as food markets unravel; the financial institutions that bet on them doing so. We will name them, and we will shame those who try to protect the status quo at the expense of the hungry.
Governments must renew their purpose as custodians of the public good rather than allowing these vested interests to set the agenda. And we must be hold elected officials accountable if they don't, demanding change at the ballot box. We must build power and ensure politicians quiver in fear that we might use it.
Responsible businesses can help enable this future of prosperity and many already are. They are breaking ranks with protectors of the status quo, strengthening the will of politicians and governments to act. They are embracing effective regulation rather than undermining it. They are directing their business models and practices towards addressing the challenges we face.
But they must do better and citizens and customers must demand this of them. The incentives under which businesses operate must shift so that they can no longer impose their social and environmental costs on others and instead flourish in their responsible behavior.
Inspired by such ideas, and motivated by a desire for a better future, organizations, businesses, movements, and networks for a new prosperity are appearing, growing, and connecting up all over the world. Poor farmers are demanding fair shares from national budgets and market chains; leaders and scientists are working on sustainable agriculture; environmentalists are calling for a healthier and safer future; women are claiming their rights to opportunity; communities are leading healthier lifestyles; movements are forming—such as Fair Trade, which links ethical consumers and the private sector; and grassroots campaigns are clamoring for the right to food to be respected. The list is long and growing.
We are proud to stand alongside them. We will join their efforts to make practical positive changes in how we produce, consume, share, and manage food and other resources to move beyond this age of crisis to a new age of prosperity. Soon there will be nine billion of us on the planet and for better or worse we are all in this together. For those of you looking to be leaders in the fight for a better future, we hope you will join us and GROW.
http://civileats.com/2011/06/01/growing-a-movement/
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From Southeast Farm Press
RFA counters Oxfam biofuels claims
From the Renewable Fuels Association
Jun. 1, 2011 7:01am
• Global biofuels production is a means to enhancing global food security and tackling problems of climate change.
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. A new report from Oxfam rightfully raises concerns about the potential effects of unmitigated commodity speculation, escalating oil prices, underinvestment in agriculture technology, and climate change on future world food supplies.
But the report misses the mark when it makes unsupported claims about the effect of biofuels on global food supplies.
Global biofuels production is a means to enhancing global food security and tackling problems of climate change. According to an UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report released just last week, "…investment in bioenergy could spark much-needed investment in agricultural and transport infrastructure in rural areas and, by creating jobs and boosting household incomes, could alleviate poverty and food security."
"American ethanol production has helped spur needed investment and research into dramatic advances in farming technology that have allowed U.S. farmers to double their production on the same amount of land from a generation ago," said Renewable Fuels Association President and CEO Bob Dinneen.
"The same opportunities at varying scales are available to farm communities in developing nations. Together with improved farming technologies, local biofuels production can provide developing rural economies
http://southeastfarmpress.com/markets/rfa-counters-oxfam-biofuels-claims
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