The Pakistan floods underline the impossibility of dealing separately with the three interconnected and interdependent ecological, financial and political crises now affecting every country.
Climate change is obviously implicated in the tremendous levels of rainfall, but the impact of the floods has been exacerbated by economic and political failure and corruption at local and national level.
A study conducted by the Pakistan Forest Institute reported on Al Jazeera shows a 0.85°C increase in temperatures in Peshawar between 1985 and 2009 - an increase of 0.034°C each year.
The seasons have changed, with spring starting 15.6 days earlier and becoming 17.8 days shorter. The extreme summer season, with a mean maximum temperature of 35°C, has grown longer, running for five months, from May to September.
There was a 30 per cent decrease in rainfall, with a shift towards a dry tropical climate where for eight months of the year less than 25mm of rain fell. This year’s unprecedented monsoon rains are a further indicator of climate change, according to Bashir Khan, the director-general of the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency.
The people in the Swat Valley have been most cruelly hit. Last year the Pakistan army, urged on by the Obama administration, launched a punitive assault on the Taliban, who were getting above themselves in the area, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were forced to flee.
They returned in recent months, only to have the floods and timber wreck more than 50 villages completely. Many people have died, and will die as they are cut off from aid, medicine and clean water. The government has failed to show as much vigour mobilising the army to get aid to the area now.
The Taliban were working with, or indeed WERE the “timber mafia” in the Malakand region where they were allowed to stay in control from 2007 to 2009. During that time more than 70 per cent of forests were cut down, contribuing the present disaster.
But everywhere, local politicians, police and military are either powerless to stop the loggers and big landowners, or are in their pay – or both. Bribery, corruption, and complicity with terror go hand-in-hand to undermine any environmental protection.
The loss of forests transforms even a normal monsoon from a benefit to a curse. Forests absorbs water, and help refill aquifers. Without trees, flash floods run off into rivers, with no benefit for next year’s crops and without replenishing wells and springs. Fertile top soil is washed away.
Controlling illegal logging and promoting reforestation are G8 Millennium Goal priorities, yet the regulatory regime fails to prevent illegally logged timber being laundered into the official world market. A report published by Chatham House in 2002 warned that regulation of the trade was problematic as it might be subject to challenge at the World Trade Organisation.
The promise of Pakistan independence has been realised only for the rich. In a country which invests vast resources in nuclear weapons to sustain a nationalist, sectarian dispute with India, almost half the population are getting by on just one meal a day according to the United Nations.
Pakistan’s failed state system, exempified by the huge wealth amassed by the president Asif Ali Zardari, with his banks accounts and properties in a number of countries, cannot deliver rights, food and ecological protection. The same state and security services works hand in glove with the reactionary madrasas and the Taliban, when it suits both parties. It cannot be reformed to serve ordinary people’s interests.
The way forward must be to develop a new kind of revolutionary organisation to represent the interests of the masses, replacing those like the Pakistan People’s Party who merely manipulate them to gain power. A new organisation will have to think globally, becoming part of an international movement, and act locally and to put ordinary people in control of their own lives, their local economies and ecology.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Pakistan floods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pakistan floods. Show all posts
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Making money out of extreme weather
Capitalism has a genius for inventiveness that drives those who represent its interests to extraordinary feats of creativity. The more extreme the weather, the more money they can make.
Global temperatures in the first half of the year have been the highest since records began 130 years ago. Synchronised violent weather events are disrupting and consuming lives and displacing millions across the world from Pakistan through Russia to the USA.
The entire population of Moscow is struggling for breath and hundreds have already died as the city is engulfed in smoke from wildfires burning throughout vast areas of European Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The long drought which turned the land to tinder has ruined crops on a huge scale while in Pakistan up to 14 million are affected by floods in one of the greatest disasters in history.
With mounting evidence of the effects of climate change adding up to a planetary emergency, post-Copenhagen talks have taken a step backward. The Obama administration has all but abandoned attempts to pass emissions limiting legislation because the additional costs on business might impact their chances in the November elections.
This is further proof that there can be no solution within the framework of capitalist society. Quite the opposite. Capitalists can and do find ways to overcome any barrier to profitable activity, irrespective of the lives they trample on the road to riches.
Reports say that commodity traders from Glencore International prompted the Russian government to ban exports of wheat, thereby boosting the already soaring world price of this critical foodstuff, denying access to the next meal for billions of people, but enabling the Swiss-based commodities corporation to increase its profits. The ban on exports meant that grain trader Glencore could cancel its contracts based on earlier, lower prices and make new deals exploiting the increase. The brilliance of the seriously sick at work.
Wheat isn’t the only globally-traded commodity which has seen prices rocketing in recent days. There’s a causal connection between the horse-has-bolted attempts to rescue the global financial system and the price of basic foods including barley and rice.
Joachim von Braun, former director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute puts it like this:
Another example of this deranged genius comes from the United States. The location is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the home of the market in financial derivatives that, from the 1990s onwards, did so much to express and satisfy the mounting demand for credit throughout the late stages of the post-war economic expansion.
The mathematical wizards who invent money-spinners for the global gamblers have come up with a new futures market in “cooling degree days (CDDs)”. It works like this: in common with much of the rest of the northern hemisphere, the US is experiencing record temperatures. Demand for air conditioning has seen power consumption rise by 10%, boosting the profits of the power generators and suppliers. CDDs give a measure of demand derived from the degrees of air temperature in excess of 65oF (18.3oC) and speculators with money to burn gamble on what this number will be in a few months time.
By any standard these people are among the clinically insane. Capitalist exploitation of the planet and its people has to end, as a matter of extreme urgency, before we are dragged beyond the limits of the ecosystems’ ability to recover.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Global temperatures in the first half of the year have been the highest since records began 130 years ago. Synchronised violent weather events are disrupting and consuming lives and displacing millions across the world from Pakistan through Russia to the USA.
The entire population of Moscow is struggling for breath and hundreds have already died as the city is engulfed in smoke from wildfires burning throughout vast areas of European Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The long drought which turned the land to tinder has ruined crops on a huge scale while in Pakistan up to 14 million are affected by floods in one of the greatest disasters in history.
With mounting evidence of the effects of climate change adding up to a planetary emergency, post-Copenhagen talks have taken a step backward. The Obama administration has all but abandoned attempts to pass emissions limiting legislation because the additional costs on business might impact their chances in the November elections.
This is further proof that there can be no solution within the framework of capitalist society. Quite the opposite. Capitalists can and do find ways to overcome any barrier to profitable activity, irrespective of the lives they trample on the road to riches.
Reports say that commodity traders from Glencore International prompted the Russian government to ban exports of wheat, thereby boosting the already soaring world price of this critical foodstuff, denying access to the next meal for billions of people, but enabling the Swiss-based commodities corporation to increase its profits. The ban on exports meant that grain trader Glencore could cancel its contracts based on earlier, lower prices and make new deals exploiting the increase. The brilliance of the seriously sick at work.
Wheat isn’t the only globally-traded commodity which has seen prices rocketing in recent days. There’s a causal connection between the horse-has-bolted attempts to rescue the global financial system and the price of basic foods including barley and rice.
Joachim von Braun, former director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute puts it like this:
There are increasing indications that some financial capital is shifting from speculation on housing and complex derivatives to commodities, including food. While the financial markets have recently been regulated to curb excessive speculation, commodity markets have remained largely untouched and are the open flank of the system attracting speculation. A food price crisis is not of great significance for the relatively rich. But for the bottom 3 billion it poses a nutrition disaster with appalling long-term health consequences. The number of undernourished people has increased against the backdrop of economic recession.
Another example of this deranged genius comes from the United States. The location is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the home of the market in financial derivatives that, from the 1990s onwards, did so much to express and satisfy the mounting demand for credit throughout the late stages of the post-war economic expansion.
The mathematical wizards who invent money-spinners for the global gamblers have come up with a new futures market in “cooling degree days (CDDs)”. It works like this: in common with much of the rest of the northern hemisphere, the US is experiencing record temperatures. Demand for air conditioning has seen power consumption rise by 10%, boosting the profits of the power generators and suppliers. CDDs give a measure of demand derived from the degrees of air temperature in excess of 65oF (18.3oC) and speculators with money to burn gamble on what this number will be in a few months time.
By any standard these people are among the clinically insane. Capitalist exploitation of the planet and its people has to end, as a matter of extreme urgency, before we are dragged beyond the limits of the ecosystems’ ability to recover.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Liberate science to tackle world hunger
Growing enough food to feed the world’s population is already achieved, though poor people often can’t access or afford it and rich countries waste as much as 30%.
The fact that population growth will peak in around 2050 means that it should be possible to produce sufficient food, provided there is a transformation to more sustainable farming and land use. And provided, of course, that there is a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and global warming is capped and then reversed.
The scientific journal Nature, in a special issue on food and farming, concludes: “Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.” Nature calls for a “second green revolution” and says:
But the call for “a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research” is a big demand. Public investment in agricultural research has collapsed and the only investors are profit-driven corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont. It is certainly not possible to feed the world with the current profit-driven, smash-and-grab approach of global agri-business.
Far from transforming the way land is used, transnationals are buying it up for intensive industrialised use. Even marginal land that will be entirely destroyed by two or three seasons of chemical-driven agriculture is being grabbed. Genetic modification in the hands of corporations continues to produce unforeseen outcomes that leave the profits of the transnationals intact but leave farmers duped – or forced – into planting GM seed – bankrupt.
The Chinese government is investing in research, but in a reckless and uncontrolled way. From “cloud-seeding” to GM seeds, China is carrying out a massive experiment on its land and people. It has emerged that companies that are part-owned by the state agriculture research institutes where the seeds were developed, have sold genetically modified rice seed to Chinese farming corporations. The relevant safety certificates were never issued.
The reality is that capitalism’s only response to this contemporary set of challenges has been a dramatic increase in market speculation in food and land. New investment funds are being established to profit from the global land grab, with Morgan Stanley to the fore.
And a further devastating price spike is on the horizon as thousands of hectares of grain crops in Punjab – Pakistan’s “bread basket” –have been swept away by the floods, whilst the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine has been devastated by unprecedented drought. The UN has called for calm, as the world market price for wheat surged – by 7% on one day last week – on forecasts that 25m tonnes has been lost from the global harvest.
It is often said that people have lost confidence in science and its ability to make the world a better place. But it is the economic and political system within which science functions that is untrustworthy. Already thousands of scientists are working on responses to global warming, often in institutions that receive little or no funding.
Released from the need to focus on increased profits by their funding masters, science could contribute not only to feeding the world, but also to transforming agriculture into an activity that works in harmony with the evolutionary biology of plants and people.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
The fact that population growth will peak in around 2050 means that it should be possible to produce sufficient food, provided there is a transformation to more sustainable farming and land use. And provided, of course, that there is a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and global warming is capped and then reversed.
The scientific journal Nature, in a special issue on food and farming, concludes: “Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.” Nature calls for a “second green revolution” and says:
Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs — created, for example, through long-neglected research on modifying roots — and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and curbing waste. (Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced worldwide is lost or spoiled.)
But the call for “a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research” is a big demand. Public investment in agricultural research has collapsed and the only investors are profit-driven corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont. It is certainly not possible to feed the world with the current profit-driven, smash-and-grab approach of global agri-business.
Far from transforming the way land is used, transnationals are buying it up for intensive industrialised use. Even marginal land that will be entirely destroyed by two or three seasons of chemical-driven agriculture is being grabbed. Genetic modification in the hands of corporations continues to produce unforeseen outcomes that leave the profits of the transnationals intact but leave farmers duped – or forced – into planting GM seed – bankrupt.
The Chinese government is investing in research, but in a reckless and uncontrolled way. From “cloud-seeding” to GM seeds, China is carrying out a massive experiment on its land and people. It has emerged that companies that are part-owned by the state agriculture research institutes where the seeds were developed, have sold genetically modified rice seed to Chinese farming corporations. The relevant safety certificates were never issued.
The reality is that capitalism’s only response to this contemporary set of challenges has been a dramatic increase in market speculation in food and land. New investment funds are being established to profit from the global land grab, with Morgan Stanley to the fore.
And a further devastating price spike is on the horizon as thousands of hectares of grain crops in Punjab – Pakistan’s “bread basket” –have been swept away by the floods, whilst the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine has been devastated by unprecedented drought. The UN has called for calm, as the world market price for wheat surged – by 7% on one day last week – on forecasts that 25m tonnes has been lost from the global harvest.
It is often said that people have lost confidence in science and its ability to make the world a better place. But it is the economic and political system within which science functions that is untrustworthy. Already thousands of scientists are working on responses to global warming, often in institutions that receive little or no funding.
Released from the need to focus on increased profits by their funding masters, science could contribute not only to feeding the world, but also to transforming agriculture into an activity that works in harmony with the evolutionary biology of plants and people.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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