ISIS Press Release 08/08/05
Sustainable World Coming
Independent scientists, economists,
politicians, and activists met to share knowledge
and ideas for sustainable food systems as the
industrial model is close to collapse. Rhea Gala
reports on the Sustainable World First
International Conference
Independent scientists join forces with
global civil society
Independent scientists from four continents
joined national politicians and many interested
individuals and groups to discuss strategies for
changing agriculture worldwide to a diversity of
locally- based sustainable systems that can
provide food sovereignty and security to all and
protect the earth from the ravages of global
warming. This was the occasion of the Sustainable
World Global Initiative's first International
Conference, organised by ISIS, which took place
14-15 July, starting in the UK Parliament in
Westminster, London, to a near-capacity audience
that includes people who have come from Scotland,
Wales and Ireland, Belgium, Australia and South
Africa.
The need to move away from large-scale high
input industrial monocultures has long been
accepted by many people as being essential for
providing livelihoods to the many millions of
small farmers in the South and the relatively few
farmers remaining in the North, who are also
responsible for conserving our plant and animal
genetic diversity that have been decimated by
decades of industrial monocultures. There is now
an added sense of urgency as the industrial model
is showing all the signs of failing under global
warming, and water and oil, on which industrial
monocultures are heavily dependent are both
rapidly depleting.
Policies that promote food export and
contravene human rights in the South also
exacerbate global warming by adding food miles,
or worse, encouraging food swaps
shipment of the same food commodities such
as milk and meat - across the globe. World cereal
yields from conventional industrial agriculture
have been decreasing for four years in a row; so
it was highly significant that speakers shared
their experience of sustainable agriculture
systems from around the world, which outperform
the industrial model in productivity while
restoring autonomy and responsibility to farmers,
and result in greater social participation within
the local community.
But what policy and structural changes are
needed to implement truly sustainable food
systems?
The big picture
Dr Mae-Wan Ho, director of ISIS and member of
the Independent Science Panel opened the
proceedings by introducing the Sustainable World
Global Initiative. She berated governments and
political leaders for their overwhelming
commitment to the prevailing neo-liberal economic
model that underlies social inequity,
environmental destruction and global warming and
emphasised that there is a wealth of existing
knowledge that can both provide sufficient food
for everyone and ameliorate climate change.
Chairperson Peter Ainsworth MP introduced Alan
Simpson MP who declared that irreverence, heresy,
and the breaking of rules were necessary to raise
awareness in the face of deepening water, energy
and food insecurity. He warned that by 2025, 6bn
people will suffer water stress, causing
water wars'; yet decades of overproduction
by agribusiness is a major cause of water
depletion.
He advocated the removal of patenting and
intellectual property rights and, instead, to
reinstate the public ownership of useful
technologies that save resources. Woking, an
English town with a population of around 100 000,
for example, currently controls and produces 135%
of its energy from renewable sources. Alan warned
strongly against the nuclear option. He said that
there are dissenters in all parties who believe
in the return and development of diverse and
sustainable food production and the right of all
countries to meet their own food security needs
without external interference. He spoke in favour
of localised sustainable systems that are
connected and informed internationally.
Sue Edwards apologised for Dr Tewolde Berhan
Gebre Egziabher's absence and presented his paper
that posed the question What does the word
sustainable' mean in the context of food
for everyone?' It means that food must be
available to the very poorest person now, and
into the indefinite future. There is currently
both plenty of food that is overeaten by some,
and plenty of hunger, even where food is present.
If people were to become the sole inheritors
of the Earth, which is threatened by mass
extinctions caused by
capitalization/commercialization of all our
resources, then we shall all be dead, he said.
Therefore a more equitable system is urgently
needed that is committed to reducing or at least
maintaining populations at a sustainable level;
and at the same time, the devolution of power
back to local communities from which it was
usurped. All people need to have the land to grow
the food of their choice . Tewolde warned against
GM crops that represent a further decrease in
diversity and an increase in the privatisation of
nature.
Dr Mae-Wan Ho stressed the enormous scope for
mitigating global warming by making our food
system sustainable, by halting deforestation,
replanting forests for agroforestry, and
harvesting biogas from agricultural and food
wastes that at the same time conserve nutrients
for crops and livestock. She presented a model of
sustainable development illustrated by a
dream farm - that depends on
maximizing internal inputs to increase
productivity and hence carbon stocks and sinks,
which, she believes, should replace the dominant
model of infinite, unsustainable growth
She showed how the carrying capacity of a
piece of land is far from constant, but depends
on the way the land is used. Thus, by maximising
internal input to support diverse productive
activities, it increases the wealth of the local
economy and hence the number of people that can
actually be supported .
Michael Meacher MP spoke of the five factors
that would force government to change their
policies sooner or probably, much later, unless
we put informed and relentless pressure on them.
The factors are: the dependence of current
systems on oil for which demand is exploding;
population movement due to water stress because
we have squandered and polluted our water; the
intensity of climate change that will affect us
in many ways, the decrease in biodiversity that
undermines our future, and escalating food miles
that will cause gridlock.
Meacher advised the promotion of low input
mixed organic agriculture that saves ten times
the energy of industrial holdings, while
factoring in all the external costs of
industrially produced food, thus exposing the lie
in the UK government's cheap food' policy.
The development of a sustainable food policy
would inform governments while reminding them of
better policies that they pay lip service to but
neglect. A new approach to environmental and
social accounting would highlight problems of
overexploitation of people and nature and offer
alternatives that would bring the public on
board.
The Common Agricultural Policy
A lively conference dinner was followed by a
stimulating discussion about the Common
Agricultural Policy led by Caroline Lucas MEP and
Martin Khor, Director of the Third World Network.
It was generally agreed that the Common
Agricultural Policy and the Agreement on
Agriculture at the World Trade Organisation have
similar effects on family farmers in both North
and South, but Martin stressed that in the South,
farmers are likely to actually die from losing
farming livelihoods, there being no social
welfare payments to fall back on .
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho raised the question of why
trade when people's livelihoods are not assured?
Why produce for export before a country is
self-sufficient in food as many Third World
countries could be? Isn't this concentration on
trade a case of the tail wagging the dog?
There was general agreement to make policies
as fair as possible for small farmers in the
South while working to curb the powers of
transnational agribusiness.
Knowledge-based actions for sustainable food
systems
Friday brought a crowded agenda: a host of
speakers with interesting experiences to relate.
Peter Bunyard of the Ecologist magazine
gave a telling account of how the destruction of
the Amazon rainforest affects global weather. The
Amazon plays a crucial role in regulating and
stabilizing world climate, which is thrown of
balance when vast areas of rainforest are cleared
to produce soya for animal feed, from which
Brazil earns $8bn annually.
The Sahara and Amazon Basins are connected by
weather systems that are the inverse of each
other and the circulation is recharged by the
Amazon, which is now failing, turning it into a
carbon source instead of a sink. The oceans are
losing the ability to regulate terrestrial
temperature, and that too, will affect climate
irreversibly. Sustainable forest use, which
clears only small areas of forest that can renew
themselves over 40 years, also avoids throwing
the forest ecosystem out of balance. Can we
return to these ways, perhaps by compensating
Brazil and other countries such as Argentina for
lost revenue, or cancelling their national debt
to begin with?
Sue Edwards spoke about sustainable
agriculture in Tigray Ethiopia. She and Tewolde
have been working with local communities to build
their knowledge, confidence and independence, in
creating local infrastructures that support food
security. They found that compost applied on
crops such as faba bean, finger millet, maize,
teff, wheat and barley, resulted in an increase
in yield over chemically fertilized crops. This
occurred from the first season, and also in
subsequent seasons when no compost was added,
through soil improvements by previous composting.
Ponds and gullies were made to conserve water,
and grass crops for animal food and thatching
proved very successful. This ecological
agriculture adds to local sustainability through
decreasing or eliminating external inputs
particularly fertiliser, and increasing animal,
crop and soil biodiversity, water resources, and
social and economic equity.
Erkki Lähde, professor of silviculture from
Finland showed how an industrial forestry model
has proved to be counterproductive for over a
century. In this model a forest is clear-cut and
a monoculture replanted, with all economic gain
coming at the point of clearance. But his
research shows that natural forest, with many
species in a special all sizes
distribution, are the most valuable both in
biodiversity and economic terms. Sustainable
systems all contain many species of many young
plants with fewer and fewer older individuals. In
the case of trees, standing and fallen dead trees
also add to local biodiversity while the living
forest continues to evolve. Individual trees are
selected for cutting in line with a social model
that supports multiple use, more jobs, and which
accords with public opinion and mitigates global
warming. This model is diametrically opposed to
the current dominant model that offers low
diversity and the easy technical option of the
clear-cut.
Caroline Lucas is concerned that past gains of
the EU on environmental issues could easily be
lost due to the pressures of an enlarged EU. This
includes the sliding away of the EU's sustainable
development strategy, and failure to resurrect
this strategy at the centre of a new EU agenda.
Industry is pushing for less environmental
regulation and for voluntary agreements only in
the new joining countries .
While the EU was set up to help keep peace in
Europe, now it is simply about trade and being
the most competitive economy in the world. In the
recent referenda on the EU Constitution, people
voted against it because they are not served by
the EU in meaningful ways, they feel the EU is
remote and self-serving. The EU could have seized
the moment to put sustainable development as the
new big idea, with economic models that protect
the environment, regulating multinationals and
advocating protective tariffs for poor countries.
Europeans would have loved it and other countries
would have followed suit.
Hywel Davies MD of Weston A Price Foundation
from Switzerland gave an account of the
relationship between early coronary artery
disease and the lack of nutrient dense food in
the western diet. Autopsies on children who died
of accidents showed thickening of tissue inside
arterial muscle laminae due to multiplication of
cells and large deposits of calcium phosphate.
These, he said, derived from an excess of vitamin
D and other additives present in large quantities
in babies' feeding formula and many common foods.
They contain supplements to compensate for
nutrition removed by food processing, but cause
problems that can only be remedied by
understanding the importance of natural nutrients
to our health and well being. For this reason, we
must grow the food that meets these requirements.
David Woodward of the New Economics Foundation
described a starting point for addressing the
economic inequalities of our current agricultural
or other neo-liberal trade systems. It showed how
people and the planet can be factored into
economics, taking a global view while narrowing
the gap between producer and consumer prices. The
effects of the new economics aim to increase the
sustainability of production while reducing
environmental damage.
Jakob von Uexkull president of the World
Future Council initiative described how those in
power have lost their way, treating people as
consumers but not as citizens. In the face of
corruption, inertia and cowardice we need an
alternative voice to get things changed and
implemented in the interests of a sustainable
world.
The World Future Council will work closely
with national legislators from all over the world
to develop step-by-step reforms and legislation
to overcome the current implementation
gap.
Pietro Perrino director of the former Gene
Bank of Bari, Italy, one of the worlds largest,
described a forced merger with much smaller
institutions engaged in genetic modification of
crops plants. He told a disturbing tale of how
his large germplasm collection is endangered by
the merger. He suspects that with the rise of DNA
libraries and a research agenda that prioritises
GM crops, plant genetic resources that cannot be
patented may be an impediment to corporate
control; but in any case they are not valued. He
asks whether this problem' has ocurred at
other genebanks around the world, and who should
look after these priceless resources.
Joe Cummins, professor of genetics from Canada
said that his country would be the first where
farmers legally lose control of their seed.
Terminator technology provides the ultimate
control of seeds production by multinational
corporations. Seed with terminator technology was
developed and owned by Monsanto, but that
technology (which involved preventing the embryo
in the seed from growing) faced worldwide
criticism and it was withdrawn by Monsanto. .
Now a new generation of GM crops that are
based on control of morphogenesis have spawned a
new crop of patents for multinationals, those GM
constructions employ toxins including diptheria
toxin or even ricin to prevent viable seeds from
being formed. The genetic modifications are very
likely to persist and spread to crops in the
wider environment. Whereas sterile seed
guarantees sales to companies; sterile crops have
no utility to the farmer, the consumer or the
environment.
Dr. Lilian Joensen from Argentina described
how corporations in Latin America have coopted
sustainable agriculture' using a façade of
involvement in social programmes. NGOs have
collaborated with them, and propaganda extolling
the benefits of free trade have enabled massive
destruction of virgin ecosystems and their
conversion to soya production. Monsanto's Roundup
Ready soya is grown on this land, as well as
conventional and certfied organic soya, mainly to
feed livestock in Europe and China.
Soya is the main agricultural source of
greenhouse gas. In Paraguay, peasants are being
killed to clear their land for more soya. Latin
American Indgenous and peasant movements are seen
as a threat to US corporate interests. Brazilian
Amaggi, the world's main soya producer, says that
small holdings don't have economic viability and
industrial holdings are needed for competition on
world markets.
Dr. Julia Wright of the Henry Doubleday
Research Association spoke about Cuba's
experience when support from the Soviet Bloc
collapsed in the 1990s and most of its fossil
fuel resources were lost. The resulting non-
industrial production promoted self sufficiency,
human scale plantations, ecological techniques,
and urban rural migration. By 2000 yield had
doubled, wages trebled and calories increased by
25%!
A policy of non-foreign land ownership and a
non-wasteful culture helped the transition from
fossil fuel dependency. Julia explained that if
the government had been committed to organic
agriculture, the gains especially in food quality
would have been much greater.
Ingrid Hartman from Humboldt University,
Germany, spoke about the status of soils and
their temporal, spatial and social dimensions.
She described how little we know about soil
because their cycles of development can last from
millions of years to only a few months. And that
what we destroy in them through pesticide and
fertiliser use causes a deficit of services in
the present, but especially in the future.
Soils have a cultural and historical
significance that contribute to human rights and
are vital for our survival, therefore we should
protect them and at least do them the service of
making compost to aid renewal.
Hannu Hyvönen, a freelance journalist from
northern Finland showed a fascinating video
illustrating how increasing the fruit species
grown in his locality has countered the genetic
erosion caused by fifty years of industrial
agriculture and promoted a resurgence of zeal and
community spirit.
First the old fruit varieties, mostly apple,
had to be sought from near and far before they
died out, and grafted to a modern variety. Local
people then participated in selecting the
tastiest ones as they have for centuries, and
these were planted from seed in their thousands
for future selection. Old varieties of plum and
cherry that thrive near the Arctic Circle are
also being rediscovered and saved.
Lim Li Ching, researcher for the Third World
Network, previously with ISIS, spoke for Elenita
Neth Dano who was unable to attend. Lim described
a project for conserving agricultural
biodiversity through participatory plant breeding
in the Philippines. In this scheme schools are
conducted within a community near areas of
industrial production to reclaim plant varieties
with traits suited to local needs and conditions.
This farmer-led initiative has trained over 1
148 farmers, given them control over their crops,
restored traditional varieties to the farm, and
increased local awareness of environmental
issues. Lim also described a very successful
biodynamic system in Mindanao that treats the
farm as a living organism.
Martin Khor of the Third World Network then
congratulated ISIS for bringing the conference to
reality against a tide of mainstream thought that
gives credence only to more competition. As it is
obvious that independent farmers can create and
develop as many viable and interesting farming
practices as there are independent farms, we must
at all times stress the services that these
farmers offer to the environment as well as the
good food that they produce.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho closed the conference by
thanking everyone and quoting Schwartzenegger,
governor of California: We know the
science, we see the threat, and we know that the
time for action is now. Schwartzenegger set
tough targets for reducing California's emissions
of greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010, to
1990 levels by 2020, and to 80% below 1990 levels
by 2050. More than 100 mayors in the United
States have also pledged to decrease greenhouse
gas emissions, despite President George W. Bush's
continued refusal to sign up to the Kyoto
Protocol.
All in all, an extremely lively conference
with plenty of audience participation. The breaks
were invariably buzzing with activity and energy.
Thanks to conference sponsors: Fondation
pour une Terre Humaine, Third World Network,
Green People, Ecological Society of the
Philippines, International Institute for
Sustainable Development, Alara Organic, Josephine
Sikabonyi, Alan Simpson MP, Michael Meacher MP,
Caroline Lucas MEP, Weston A Price Foundation,
HDRA organics and the New Economics Foundation.
See list of sponsors of the Sustainable World
Global Initiative here: http:
//www.indsp.org/reg/ISPRegWhoHasSigned.php
Available conference papers and power
points can be viewed at: http://w
ww.indsp.org/ISPSustainableWorld.php
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