Last night 500 activists arrived in Durban to campaign for one million climate jobs now. Climate jobs present a joint solution to the crises of unemployment and climate change, and it is feasible and affordable for the government to create one million climate jobs immediately. continue reading…
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Category: Press ReleasesClimate Justice Groups Call for Binding Deep and Drastic GHG Emissions Cuts by Developed Countries
Nov 29Civil society organizations from different countries and regions gathered at the “Speakers’ Corner” near the International Convention Center to demand that governments in the climate talks renew binding agreements for developed countries and commit to ambitious targets for “deep and drastic GHG emissions cuts” immediately. continue reading…
Statement of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle
On December 3, 2011, people from around the world will mark World Climate Day by demanding urgent action on global warming and climate justice. World Climate Day will be observed while the annual climate talks of the Conference of Parties (COP17/MOP7) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are taking place in Durban, South Africa from November 28th until December 11th 2011. continue reading…
Peasants and small farmers make up half of the world population and grow at least 70% of the world’s food (pdf). This group includes small-scale farmers, pastoralists, landless people, peasant fishers and indigenous people all around the world.
However, despite the importance of this group, its contribution is far from being recognised. Rural people have very little visibility on the public scene and “peasants”, in most places, are looked down on and often considered “ignorant”, “backward” or “underdeveloped”.
This contempt goes hand in hand with the free market policies in force for more than three decades that have banked (or placed a bet?) on the disappearance of peasants’ agriculture to be replaced by large agribusiness corporations and international trade.
The most recent session of the UN Human Rights Council once again showed that the word “peasant” remains politically sensitive. Under pressure from some European countries, the use of the expression “rights of peasants” was replaced by the less threatening “rights of people working in rural areas”. They seem to fear giving too much political weight to a large number of people whose trade has largely remained outside the capitalist economy.
However, over the last two decades, peasants, landless people and family farmers have organised themselves to reclaim their right to protect their livelihoods, to defend small-scale agriculture and to have their voices heard at international level. The international farmers movement La Via Campesina (pdf) was created in 1993, uniting at global level national organisations and unions that had been active for years in their own country or region.
“One of the most important things that we have learned while building of our movement has been our ability to rebuild our pride of being peasants,” explained Paul Nicholson, a Basque farmer, one of the founders of the movement. “Now we are proud to be recognised by major institutions such as the FAO and the human right councils.”
With the start of the food crisis in 2007 and the increasing number of hungry people in the world, the tide has started to turn. The blind promise that agribusiness would feed the world appeared to be a fiction, and more and more people, governments and institutions are recognising that there will be no solution to the current crisis without the participation of small-scale farmers.
The climate crisis also reveals the limitations of the agro-industrial mode of production, which is extremely fuel hungry and destroys soils and nature. Sustainable agriculture and local food markets, on the other hand, show a remarkably positive impact on climate (pdf).
It is in this context of food and climate crises that thousands of people in hundreds of local groups and organisations around the world celebrated the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles on 17 April. All kinds of activities were organised – land occupations and other direct actions, film screenings and cultural events, conferences, farmers’ markets and public debates.
The event marks the repression of a group of landless farmers in Brazil who were struggling for their right to land. On 17 April 1996, in the Amazonian state of Pará, at Eldorado dos Carajás, state military policemassacred peasants organised in the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST).
Thousands of peasants and those who advocate on their behalf are still oppressed, intimidated, arrested and killed as they struggle for land, food, economic opportunity and human rights – even though they are the very same men and women who are feeding the world.
• Henry Saragih has been the chairperson of the Indonesian Peasant Union since 1998 and was named general co-ordinator of La Via Campesina in 2004
Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI)
Tel. +62 21 7991890 Fax. +62 21 7993426
http://www.spi.or.id
Email: spi@spi.or.id, info@spi.or.id
Bank’s pattern of harmful lending disqualifies it from role in climate finance
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The World Bank continues its fossil fuel financing binge, evading environmental standards and worsening poverty and pollution — that’s the conclusion of a new report released today, just before the start of the World Bank’s spring meetings in Washington, D.C.
The report, World Bank, Climate Change and Energy Financing: Something Old. Something New?, was authored by experts at six non-governmental organizations and examines World Bank Group energy financing in a climate-constrained world. Through a series of seven case studies, the report shows how the Bank’s surge in direct and indirect fossil fuel financing and its support for large-scale energy infrastructure projects have poor poverty alleviation outcomes and call into question the institution’s claim that it is providing leadership on climate change in the developing world.
Such considerations are especially pertinent as the World Bank revamps its Energy Sector Strategy for the first time in more than a decade, as President Obama requests more than $117 million in new money for the institution, and as the Bank seeks an influential role in the UN’s new Green Climate Fund.
“The World Bank’s legacy of environmental and social harm, evasion of safeguards and accountability, and questionable track record on reducing poverty continue to cause serious problems. Regrettably, the World Bank’s draft Energy Sector Strategy looks set to maintain the polluting practices we document in this report: carbon-intensive, large-scale financing, with trickle-down benefits for the poor that are hoped for, but not often achieved,” said Sunita Dubey of groundWork/Friends of the Earth South Africa, co-editor of the report.
“In an era of poverty and climate change, clean energy leadership is called for instead of dirty business as usual. The Bank needs to clean up its act before aiming to put itself at the center of efforts to respond to climate change. It must not play any role in designing or managing the new UN green climate fund,” said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth U.S., co-editor of the report. “At a time of fiscal austerity and limited resources for international development finance, the World Bank is making a poor case for why Congress should hand it more than $117 million in 2012.”
The report’s conclusions include:
o Environmental and social safeguards apply to an ever decreasing proportion of the World Bank Group’s financing portfolio;
o Even for projects where safeguards do apply, the Bank has not incorporated the lessons of past project failings;
o Deep questions remain about the World Bank’s ability to meet its own sustainable development and poverty alleviation goals;
o The Bank’s rapidly expanding fossil fuel financing is not alleviating energy poverty for poor communities.
The seven case studies profiled in World Bank, Climate Change, and Energy Financing: Something Old. Something New? examine:
o World Bank support for fossil fuels through infrastructure lending and financial intermediaries;
o the Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit (which facilitates international offsetting and carbon trading) and support for the UN Clean Development Mechanism’s Plantar project in Brazil;
o the role of the Bank in Nigeria’s energy sector;
o the International Finance Corporation’s loan for a coal plant in India;
o the World Bank’s loan for the controversial Eskom coal project in South Africa;
o the legacy of Bank support for large hydropower and the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in Laos; and
o development policy loans in Brazil and the Belo Monte Dam Complex.
The report is published by by Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale (CRBM, Italy), CDM Watch (Belgium), Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, International Rivers (US), Friends of the Earth U.S., groundWork/Friends of the Earth South Africa, and Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE, India).
It can be found at http://www.foe.org/world-bank-climate-change-and-energy-financing
Karen Orenstein
Friends of the Earth U.S.
www.foe.org
+1-202-222-0717 (direct)
skype: ponizarga
Cancún, Mexico — As representatives of Indigenous peoples and communities already suffering the immediate impacts of climate change, we express our outrage and disgust at the agreements that have emerged from the COP16 talks. As was exposed in the Wikileaks climate scandal, the Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks.
December 11, 2010 (Cancun, Mexico) – The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.
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(Cancun, Mexico, December 11, 2010) The final outcome of the Cancun climate talks basically reflects the same negative outcome of the Copenhagen Accord in December, 2009. Therefore, it threatens the life of the Kyoto Protocol, but even more importantly, it threatens the life of humankind, because if these outcome is implemented, by the end of the century the planet will see global temperature rising by an average of over 5°C , which would make the Earth too inhospitable for our civilization.
CANCUN, MEXICO, 11 December 2010 – The agreement adopted at the UN climate talks in Cancun has failed to make progress on the most essential part: steep, binding emissions cuts for developed countries. Friends of the Earth International warns that this agreement provides a platform for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol, replacing it with a weak pledge and review system as a legacy of the Copenhagen Accord, that would lead to a devastating five degree Celsius warming. continue reading…
In the early morning hours of December 11, 2010 a COP 16 Accord was announced. However the text of this Accord did not represent an advance on what came out of last year’s “Copenhagen Accord”, and instead signalled an acceptance of the earlier ´agreement´ thereby evading any real solutions to the climate change crisis.