Palm-oil trees in the making, Ivory Coast.In his Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis teases out the mechanisms of famine in British-ruled 19th century India.

When a drought would wipe out a grain harvest in one region of India, the price of grain would spike. People all over the subcontinent would suddenly find themselves priced out of grain markets--even in places where grain harvests went well. Grain would then flow out of India to the "mother country," where people could afford it, and literally millions of Indians would starve. That's one way relatively minor natural disasters become vast human catastrophes.

Devastatingly, Davis details how the British Empire (wittingly or not) used these eminently avoidable famines to consolidate its grip over the Indian Raj.

I got to thinking of Davis' dark masterpiece while reading Andrew Rice's excellent, nuanced report, "Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?,"  in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Rice follows the gusher of money flowing from cash-rich, arable-land-poor countries like Saudi Arabia to buy up or lease farmland in Africa.

One thing that strikes me is the disconnect in what we hear about the quality of African farmland from rich investors, and what we hear about it from rich philanthropists.

Gates Foundation rhetoric makes Africa sound like a basket case, land-wise: references to "depleted" or "degraded" soils.

We hear relatively little about the continent's vast agricultural assets--which wealthy investors are now busily snapping up. Andrew Rice visits Africa's "billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone," which he describes as "a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola. "The World Bank and the FAO have declared the tract "one of the earth's last large reserves of underused land," Rice reports.

It evidently won't be for long. A stampede of investors, ranging from governments like Saudi Arabia's to U.S. hedge funds, are moving in. And many of the region's pro-Westen, "modernizing" governments are inviting them. Ethiopia, for example, is planning to lease out 3.5 million acres of prime farmland to foreign interests for 50 cents an acre, Rice reports.

Rice interviews an executive of a Saudi agribusiness firm operating there.

"For a grower, this is heaven on earth," says Jan Prins, managing director of the subsidiary company that is running the venture for Al Amoudi. Originally from the Netherlands, Prins says he assumed that Ethiopia was arid but was surprised to learn when he came to the country that much of it was fertile, with diverse microclimates. The Awassa farm is one of four that Prins is getting up and running. Using computerized irrigation systems, the farms will grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, melons and other fresh produce, the vast majority of it to be shipped to Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

My first reaction is: At those prices, maybe well-heeled Western foundations should start investing in farmland as part of a land-reform scheme. One of the many problems faced by Africa's beleaguered smallholder farmers is land tenure.

But first we'd have to convince the Western anti-poverty/development establishment that smallholder farmers count. As Rice points out, the influential British economist Paul Collier has questioned whether small-scale farmers are part of the solution to the hunger crisis at all:

Last fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that a "middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture" has clouded the African development debate with "romanticism." Approvingly citing the example of Brazil - where masses of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms - Collier concluded that "to ignore commercial agriculture as a force for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological."

Brazil was indeed a provocative example for Collier to cite. That country has aggressively ramped up ag production, opening its vast (and incredibly biodiverse) savanna to monocrop soy production. U.S. agribusiness interests operate highly profitable subsidiaries there; U.S. farmers own and run huge soy farms there. Brazil is now one of the globe's industrial-ag superpowers, a top-two exporter of soy, beef, sugar, coffee, and more.

Yet even with its supercharged agricultural sector humming, millions of Brazilians live in conditions of extreme poverty and food insecurity.As the FAO puts it:

Despite its relative prosperity (US$3500 GDP per head), 44 million Brazilians, a quarter of the population, lives in extreme poverty on a daily income which is less than US$1.06 a day.

If I'm reading Rice correctly, the play is to turn Africa into a kind of new Brazil: an export-minded agriculture superpower, smallholder farmers be damned. The high-minded case for the African land grab goes like this: Sure, huge swaths of land will be put to use to supply foreign markets; and food crops will leave a continent struggling mightily with hunger; but there will be a trickle down effect. And surely, in the event of a real hunger crisis, enough food would be kept within Africa to feed everyone.

Robert Zeigler, a U.S. botanist who heads the International Rice Research Institute, a classic Green Revolution group, made this precise case in the New York Times Magazine piece.

The idea that one country would go to another country ... and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there's a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.

When I read that, I thought of the 44 million impoverished Brazilians, scraping by while huge amounts of food leave their country; and of those late-Victorian holocausts, when millions of Indians starved while grain flowed to Mother England.

And then, thankfully, I remembered that Milwaukee-based Growing Power will soon be operating in Africa, working with smallholder farmers and urban dwellers to build self-suffiency through low-input farming. A happy thought ahead of Thanksgiving. 

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Disappearing slave history

Corporate agribusiness divides farmers

James Island’s grisly connections with the slave trade draw thousands of tourists to this shrinking patch of Gambia each year. In high season as many as a hundred tourists a day take small, motorized pirogues out to this tiny island and hire guides from nearby villages to explain the horrors once endured there.

The island was used as a staging point for the slave trade. Hundreds of men, women and children were kept in dark and overcrowded houses around the edge of the island. There was a dungeon not more than 10 foot by six foot where up to 24 of the most troublesome slaves would be chained. Slaves were kept on the island for up to a month before a boat would arrive and ship them to Goree Island in Senegal from where they would make the crossing of no return across the Atlantic to the Americas.

Today James Island holds a ruined fort, a few baobab trees and a little jetty built for the tourists. There is no room for anything else because most of the island has been lost to erosion and rising sea levels in the tidal estuary. The slave houses have fallen into the sea and it is difficult to imagine the island was ever big enough for a garrison and hundreds of slaves at a time.

Gambians are doing their best to make something out of the country’s slave history. Alex Haley’s book Roots made a village not far from James Island famous and now visitors are swamped by offers from local guides to show them the sites. UNESCO has made James Island a world heritage site and all the hotels and tour operators offer ‘Roots’ tours to the island.

The guides at James Island don’t just show tourists around. They are also trying to protect the island from further erosion. If they are not successful, in the long term this testament to the horrific history of the slave trade will be lost.

It is a cruel double blow that, historically, Gambian people were exploited by the European powers as slaves, while today climate change, caused mostly by the developed world, is threatening a key way of generating income, much needed for the country’s development.

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Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Europe places outcome of Copenhagen squarely on Obama

Africa returns to Barcelona talks, while U.S. resists giving up the numbers

The chief negotiator for the European Commission announced this afternoon in Barcelona that the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass legislation before December has doomed the chances for success in Copenhagen.

A climate protest at the Barcelona talks: World leaders with \'big heads\' moving cash from an aid money box to a climate money box. The stunt highlights rich country plans to use overseas aid money to pay for their climate finance commitments.Oxfam InternationalEurope now predicts that a legally binding treaty is impossible to expect in Copenhagen, and that it could take up to a full year beyond the global summit this December in order to reach a binding deal. 

Artur Runge-Metzger, the chief negotiator for the European Commission, told reporters today that, “It was highly desirable to have the [U.S.] numbers on the table in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt.”

Runge-Metzger confirmed that any chance of rescuing a deal in Copenhagen “depends then very much on President Obama himself, on how confident he feels [about] how far the process has moved forward, whether he can also put numbers on the table or not.”

“Everybody sees political realities particularly in Washington and we know that the process there is slowing down politically,” he said.  “So we need to be flexible. We cannot say that Copenhagen is the end.”

When asked whether Europe expected more rapid change from the Obama administration after eight years of Bush, Runge-Metzger said, “I have never expected the U.S. [position] changing totally. The interests in the different states are still the same as they were 5 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago.”

“The reduction targets is really what, politically, is the most difficult issue, and certainly not something that is going to be decided by senior officials in a normal negotiation round. For that you will need to have ministerial blessing or heads of state coming together. We would hope that we can finalize that in Copenhagen,” Runge-Metzger said.

Runge-Metzger confirmed that, regarless of what transpires in Copenhagen, the E.U. plans to move forward with the implementation of policies to reduce European greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That target is far lower than the 40 percent or more reduction demanded by Africa and the G-77 developing nations.

“Their [African and G-77] demands on developed countries to make deep emissions cuts, I don’t think that this gulf will be closed in the next week,” Runge-Metzger said.

Sudanese delegate Lumumba Stanislaus-Kaw Di-Aping, who heads the G-77-plus-China block, confirmed Thursday that Africa and the G-77 remain steadfast in their position that a so-called “politically binding agreement” is an unacceptable result in Copenhagen.

“We are totally against that,” he told me in the hallway of the Barcelona convention shortly after the G-77 cancelled its daily press conference in what Lumumba described as an “unfortunate” move based on a “joint decision” by the G-77 not to speak with the press at present. 

If a legally binding agreement cannot emerge from Copenhagen, then “we resolve to continue the negotiations in the future,” Lumumba said.

But Africa and the G-77 developing countries refuse to entertain anything less than a legally binding treaty. The African and G-77 delegations want a treaty that commits developed nations to reduce emissions by 40 percent or more below 1990 levels by the year 2020, a level which Africa feels is necessary to avoid death and destruction in vulnerable areas.

With the news that all bets are off on reaching a legally binding treaty in Copenhagen, delegates and observers in Spain are left wondering what could have been if the U.S. had acted sooner domestically. The U.S. Congress has failed the world, and developing nations will pay a steep price unless President Obama can personally rescue the Copenhagen talks.

That will depend on whether he even shows up in Denmark in December. Sorry Africa, don't hold your breath.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

The African nations that walked out of the climate negotiations on Monday, just hours after the Barcelona meeting started, returned late yesterday. The point of the day-long demonstration was made. Delegates of the 192 nations gathered here to make significant progress on a new climate treaty next month in Copenhagen are frustrated, terribly frustrated with the United States for not taking two momentous steps. One is defining the quantity of carbon it is ready to remove from the atmosphere. And the second is putting on the table a definite dollar amount the U.S. is prepared to invest to help developing nations make the transition to cleaner and economically greener economies.

Given the scary hazards of climate change - more killer storms, rising seas, farmland turning to dust, and time running out on reaching agreement on a global plan that leads to a solution  - there's considerable sympathy, even in the American delegation, for the oft-expressed sentiments of annoyance that world leaders are conveying publicly in the media and privately to the U.S. delegation.

Jonathan Pershing, the deputy special envoy for climate change and the chief American negotiator in Barcelona, said as much to start the week when he explained in a news conference that the Senate deliberations on a new climate and energy bill was an impediment to the Obama administration's ability to commit to carbon reduction limits and investments for developing nations. The administration is mindful of what happened at Kyoto in 1997 when the U.S. signed the climate treaty but never submitted it for Congressional approval.

That was just fine with President George W. Bush, who never really embraced the dangers of climate change, rejected the treaty, and seemed to delight in jabbing his thumb in the belly of the U.N. and global negotiators for eight years. Pershing said as forcefully as the conventions of nuance in the diplomatic dialect spoken at such gatherings that the administration is committed to ensuring that the climate negotiations proceed to a satisfying conclusion in Copenhagen.

Pershing said "development of a domestic number is under way and we are actively working with the Congress." He cautioned against deciding "how blame is apportioned. That is not a constructive thing. We think we can get there. The constructive thing is to push forward on an agreement."

"All countries are making their own choices about how they do their negotiation," Pershing said. "In Kyoto we brought something home that we thought would be acceptable and Congress did not accept it. We are working together with Congress to adopt something internationally that we can enact domestically. "

He added:  "We fortunately have another month for work to be done in the US and around the word. We will continue to work actively in the Senate and we think we will have the kind of information we need to move forward."

On Tuesday in Washington President Obama essentially said the same thing after meeting with European
Union leaders. He pledged on Tuesday to redouble efforts for a climate deal, provided no details, and introduced a new way to define success at Copenhagen. "We discussed climate change extensively and all of us agreed that it was imperative for us to redouble our efforts in the weeks between now and the
Copenhagen meeting to ensure that we create a framework for progress."

In essence the American president and his climate negotiating team are asking the world to trust them. The question in Barcelona, still not answered as day three unfolds, is whether there is enough credibiity in the U.S. position. That question won't be answered today and likely not at this meeting. But it will be answered before the end of the year. Why?

Because two years ago leaders of nearly 200 nations committed to these diabolically difficult negotiations, buffeted by economic, ideological, and geographical impediments of every sort, in order to reach Copenhagen in December 2009 to sign a global treaty with the completely serious goal of saving the world.

In a series of negotiating sessions, periodically convened since in places like Bangkok, Bonn, Bali, and Barcelona, the basic outlines of the plan have indeed taken shape and they are apparent in Barcelona. The limits that developed countries are willing to put on carbon pollution that causes climate change is now common knowledge. The dimensions of the technological changes that are necessary to completely alter how the world powers itself have come into clearer focus. The magnitude of the cost of making the transition to a new epoch have been calculated. And there is general agreement that the wealthy nations that burned all that carbon-rich fuel have financial responsibilities to the developing countries that want to get cleaner and economically greener.

The process is being helped and hindered because the clock is ticking. There are just three more days here, and 29 more until Copenhagen for the parties to this treaty writing process to tie all of the various strands into a rope strong enough to haul the world away from peril and into an entirely different era where the quality of the environment and the strength of the economy are one and the same.

"Copenhagen must open the door to the common good and close the door to human disaster," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who is overseeing the negotiations. "Barcelona is essential to putting the architecture in place. This will not be a spectacular session, but it will be an important one."

Success in the Barcelona meeting, say delegates and climate advocates, means more clearly defining which nations will put less carbon into the atmosphere, how it will be done and who will pay, shaping new markets, agreeing to monitor and enforce new rules, sharing clean energy and pollution control technology, making available energy efficiency practices. It also means agreeing to an effective system to help vulnerable regions like Bengladesh and most of Africa cope with the changing climate. And most importantly it means gaining a legally binding pact that commits nations to do what they said they'd do.

Very plainly, if all that and about a hundred other details gain more definition in Barcelona, the participating countries would have cooperated in a way that the nations of the world are just not accustomed to. And more importantly Copenhagen could be the moment and the place that countries either sign -- as most countries want to do-- or agree to make progress toward completing -- as the U.S. prefers -- what is generally considered the most complicated, confounding, necessary, and expensive international agreement ever considered.

"This is the moment of truth when the world decides whether it is committed to solving climate change or just playing theater," said Kim Carstensen, leader of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative. "We've been dismayed by statements that there is too little time left. We insist that we have the time to develop a binding outcome, to achieve emissions reductions, to show action on developing countries, finance, and institutions. We have the public will."

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

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Negotiations among more than 190 countries meeting in Barcelona to address climate change continued today, but only on certain matters, as delegates from 50 African nations collectively shut down the talks about how to extend the Kyoto Protocol when the first phase of the agreement expires in 2012. Africa refuses to continue the negotiations until developed nations commit to reduce global warming emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, a target that scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts from climate change.

"Africa believes that the other groups are not taking talks seriously enough, not urgently enough," said Kabeya Tshikuku of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“People are dying now while those who are responsible historically are not willing to take action,” added Algerian delegate Kamel Djemouai.

By drawing a line in the sand, African delegates hope to elicit specific plans from the European Union, Australia, and other countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol to slash carbon output. Developing nations demand that the West put forth detailed numbers on emissions-reduction goals as well as financial assistance for developing nations to spur clean technology deployment and adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change.

Members of the G-77 plus China group expressed support for the African position today, and have asked the chair of the Kyoto negotiations to press developed countries for specific slash-and-cash targets. Until those targets are announced publicly, “we should refrain from engaging in such a wasteful exercise,” said Sudanese delegate Lumumba Stanislaus-Kaw Di-Aping, who heads the G-77 plus China block. 

The African and G-77 plus China delegates assert that an ambitious, science-based deal must be forged in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“A weaker deal will lead to our death,” Di-Aping said plainly, alluding to the predicted fate of low-lying island nations and developing countries that are most sensitive to climate disruption.

Insufficient funding for developing countries would greatly reduce the ability of poor nations to recover from climate shocks in the near term, and weaken their resilience to ward off future disasters as climate change accelerates.

Meanwhile, negotiators from many developed countries continued Tuesday to try to steer expectations away from the prospect of reaching a legally binding agreement in Denmark this December. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Reuters yesterday that a “politically binding agreement” could emerge from Copenhagen, but the final legally binding decisions are outside the realm of possibility for this year. 

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stated today that, “realistically speaking, we may not be able to have all the words on detailed matters," confirming that much work will be left unfinished at the conclusion of the Copenhagen summit.

In other words, while representatives from the developing world are calling for a strong, science-based treaty to combat climate change and save the poorest and most vulnerable nations from climate catastrophe, wealthy industrialized nations want to substitute lofty politic rhetoric for a commitment to action in Copenhagen.   

“Copenhagen isn’t about creating photo opportunities for politicians,” Tove Ryding of Greenpeace International told reporters Tuesday. “It is about getting an agreement that prevents climate chaos.”

Africa and the rest of the developing world could not agree more. 

The U.S. was largely below the radar screen in Barcelona today, but all that is likely to change tomorrow when delegates hear the news of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech pressing Congress to act on climate, and learn the result of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s attempt to mark up the Kerry-Boxer bill despite a GOP boycott.

Stay tuned for more on the fireworks (er, mostly duds) from Barcelona.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Learning how to count to 350

African negotiators at the U.N. climate talks in Barcelona refused to continue formal discussions about all other issues until wealthy countries live up to their legal and moral responsibility to commit to deep emissions reductions. Rich countries (also called “Annex 1 countries”) have ground negotiations to a halt by failing to agree to their new targets under the Kyoto Protocol, driving developing countries to put their feet down. This walkout is significant and opens up political space -- it means many of the countries in Africa just stopped one half of the U.N. climate negotiation process until rich countries say how much they will reduce their carbon.

We’re down to the wire: just four negotiating days left before the big agreement in Copenhagen is supposed to go down. We've now seen a taste of the breakdowns to come. While rich countries continue to undermine commitments for the Kyoto Protocol (one of two negotiating tracks for Copenhagen, it's supposed to be renewed for a second commitment period of Annex 1 targets), the spin has already taken hold: they’re blaming Africa for their own delay-mongering. Oy vey.

In response, movement and civil-society organizations held a demonstration at the U.N. building in support of African delegates' insistence that developed countries commit to new, strong, binding targets. Delegates and observers were invited to join a human shield against the killing of Kyoto targets (complete with an Annex 1 grim reaper) and urged to promote at least 40 percent emission reductions with no offsets by 2020.

Kamese Geoffrey of NAPE/Friends of the Earth Uganda warned, "Rich countries are attempting to dodge their legal and moral responsibilities to reduce emissions. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they will be the first to face the devastating impacts of climate change."

Many of us have longstanding criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, particularly its market mechanisms. But here’s why Kyoto is important: It contains a few core provisions and basic justice frameworks that the U.S. and other Annex 1 countries are trying to avoid.

1) Compliance. This means the international community evaluates whether or not you’ve come through on your commitments, set to a specific time period.

2) Overall targets (AKA top-down target setting). This means the international community decides what the targets for CO2 reduction are, and then divides up responsibilities accordingly. Equity and science decide. The U.S. wants the opposite -- each country consulting with industry to see what it thinks it can muster, and then we just see where we land.

3) “Common but differentiated responsibilities.” This is the most important framework to save. It means that the industrialized countries caused the problem of global warming, and the Global South is dealing with the worst of the impacts first (droughts, floods, famines, hurricanes, etc. are all hitting the equator now in ways that will only come to the rest of the world later). In order for the Global South to reduce emissions, they need finance and technology from industrialized countries or else we are robbing them of their right to develop -- there just isn’t space for everyone to follow the North’s dirty development path. “Ecological debt” is one way to think about it. This is the most basic framework of justice, which is what people mean when they say “the North must lead,” and why the idea that both Annex 1 and G77 countries “need to act together” is actually a deeply corrupt and unjust framework.

The idea that we can somehow replace a legally binding instrument with a voluntary pledge system is insanity. In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was first ratified, it had been watered down tremendously in the hopes of getting the U.S. to sign. The U.S. didn’t sign (though it remains party to the convention). Yet under the Bali Action Plan, agreed to in December 2007, the U.S. is required to take on comparable efforts to other Annex 1 countries under Kyoto -- which means that in theory, the rest of the world could continue the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.S. would have to come along whether it signs or not. Instead, we’ve seen a race to the bottom -- other Annex 1 countries hiding behind U.S. inaction and refusal to sign, claiming the world cannot make an agreement without the U.S. on board.

So the shit is hitting the fan. And Africa isn’t taking it. We should applaud their courage, and be skeptical anytime the media tries to shift the blame for the breakdown of negotiations onto G77 countries. Make no mistake, these talks have been polluted by self-interested corporations and governments, and all roads lead back to Annex 1 (and the U.S. in particular).

It’s a myth that Kyoto expires in 2012 -- only the first commitment period of Annex 1 greenhouse-gas emission reductions ends. We need to support the basic frameworks of a legally binding treaty, and need to ensure there is a second Kyoto commitment period. Period.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

A mangrove seedling planted in the Saloum Delta in Senegal.Atlantic Rising

"Become a superhero, plant your mangrove today," declared the poster.

Eager to enter the pantheon of mangrove superheroes, we headed to the Saloum Delta in Senegal where the world's largest mangrove planting project is underway. Organized by local NGO, Oceanium, almost 30 million mangroves have been planted since June.

The mangrove is a hero among flora. It provides firewood for cooking and smoking fish, branches for building rooftops, and breeding grounds for countless species of fish, including oysters that cling stubbornly to the mangroves' spider-like roots.

Mangroves are an important ecosystem anchor for coastal tidelands in the tropics.Atlantic RisingAbdoulaye Diouf, Chef de Zone in Sandicoly, tells us that the fishermen had noticed a decline in the number of fish in recent years. This was attributed to over-fishing and a decline in mangrove coverage caused by unseasonal heavy rains.

As well as replenishing depleted mangrove stocks, Jean Goepp, Oceanium's project coordinator, says that the project teaches people to conserve their resources. "People must re-plant their common resources, not just their gardens", he says. Mr Diouf says the village is now aware that it must use all its resources sustainably - the sea, forest, and mangroves.

The mangroves were chosen as the resource to launch this behaviour-changing initiative because once planted they require no human input. Occupying the swampy inter-tidal zone, they require no watering and are naturally protected from bush fires and hungry cattle.

Eighty-thousand people have been involved in the project, planting and collecting seedlings from the flowering mangrove trees for which they are paid 1,000 CFA (about $2.50) per sack. Oceanium provides a financial incentive to the community as well.

Planting is simple. You create a hole in the wet swampy sand with an extended index finger and plug it with a seedling. Hey presto, you're a superhero.

In Sandicoly, the project has been accompanied by soccer success and the village is through to the regional cup final. They plan to use the mangrove money to take their supporters to the match. It will be ice creams all round as mangrove superheroes cheer on soccer superstars.

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Hotel managers in Gambia say without the beach the tourists will not come. But the beach in front of the country’s two landmark hotels is disappearing pretty fast. It is a very serious state of affairs for a country that derives a major percentage of its income from tourism.

Beach erosion is clearly visible at tourist areas in Gambia.Lynn Morris / Atlantic RisingEuropean tourists lie baking themselves on sun loungers outside the five-star Kairaba and its neighbor Senegambia, a hotel so famous an area of town was named after it, but the patch of sand on which they lie is getting narrower each month.

Five years ago, the government embarked on a $20 million beach replenishment project. Head of coastal and marine environment at the National Environment Agency, Momodou Suwareh explained how the government identified the areas of greatest economic importance threatened by erosion.

He said: “The hotel areas were targeted first.” Part of the work involved bringing sand from off shore to the beach in front of Kairaba and Senegambia creating a beach more than a 100 meters (328 feet) wide. After just two years half the sand had disappeared and now it is back to the state it was in before the work with just 26 meters (85 feet) between the hotel’s fence and the high water mark.

Mr Suwareh said he was disappointed with how quickly the sand has been lost but for the hotels struggling to compete for tourists the situation is increasingly urgent.

Landing Singhateh, front office manager at the Kairaba, said: “We are hopeful the government will do something.”

He thinks a solution is in the pipeline but said if the state does nothing about the beach then perhaps the hotels have to work out a solution for themselves.

He said: “We use the beach in the adverts for the hotel. If there was no beach people would not come.” Judging by the importance of tourism to the country’s economy it seems the government will be compelled to act but long term solutions to the problem of coastal erosion are both expensive and elusive.

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Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Desertification of formerly productive farm land is one of the many reasons for a growing number of environmental refugees around the world.Photo: pizzodisevo via FlickrOur early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

Desert expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, principally in the Sahelian countries, is displacing millions of people -- forcing them to either move southward or migrate to North Africa. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe. This flow of migrants has been under way for many years.

In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered a boat bound for Italy carrying refugees from Africa. After being adrift for more than two weeks and having run out of fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living shared the boat, resembling what a rescuer described as “a scene from Dante’s Inferno.”

The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya, but the survivors would not reveal their country of origin, lest they be sent home. We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that Somalia is an ecological disaster, with overpopulation, overgrazing, and the resulting desertification destroying its pastoral economy.

Perhaps the largest flow of Somali migrants is into Yemen, another failing state. In 2008, an estimated 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers reached Yemen, 70 percent more than in 2007. And during the first three months of 2009 the migrant flow was up 30 percent over the same period in 2008. These numbers simply add to the already unsustainable pressures on Yemen’s land and water resources, hastening its decline.

On April 30, 2006, a man fishing off the coast of Barbados discovered a 20-foot boat adrift with the bodies of 11 young men on board, bodies that were “virtually mummified” by the sun and salty ocean spray. As the end drew near, one passenger left a note tucked between two bodies: “I would like to send my family in Basada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye.” The author of the note was apparently one of a group of 52 who had left Senegal on Christmas Eve aboard a boat destined for the Canary Islands, a jumping off point for Europe. They must have drifted for some 2,000 miles, ending their trip in the Caribbean. This boat was not unique. During the first weekend of September 2006, police intercepted boats from Mauritania with a record total of nearly 1,200 people on board.

For those living in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Mexico is often the gateway to the United States. In 2008, Mexican immigration authorities reported some 39,000 detentions and 89,000 deportations.

In the city of Tapachula on the Guatemala-Mexico border, young men in search of jobs wait along the tracks for a slow-moving freight train passing through the city en route to the north. Some make it onto the train. Others do not. The Jesús el Buen Pastor refuge is home to 25 amputees who lost their grip and fell under a train while trying to board. For these young men, says Olga Sánchez Martínez, the director of the refuge, this is the “end of their American dream.” A local priest, Flor María Rigoni, calls the migrants attempting to board the trains “the kamikazes of poverty.”

Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, Spain, and Turkey are a daily occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people. And each day Mexicans risk their lives in the Arizona desert trying to reach jobs in the United States. On average, some 100,000 or more Mexicans leave rural areas every year, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make a living. They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many of those who try to cross the Arizona desert perish in its punishing heat. Since 2001, some 200 bodies have been found along the Arizona border each year.

With the vast majority of the 2.4 billion people to be added to the world by 2050 coming in countries where water tables are already falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty. Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Advancing deserts are squeezing expanding populations into an ever smaller geographic area. Whereas the U.S. Dust Bowl displaced 3 million people, the advancing desert in China’s Dust Bowl provinces could displace tens of millions.

Africa, too, is facing this problem. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to deal with drought and desertification, Morocco is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain with less thirsty orchards and vineyards.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water already number in the thousands. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour’s drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned. And as the desert takes over in Nigeria, farmers and herders are forced to move, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. Desertification refugees typically end up in cities, many in squatter settlements. Others migrate abroad.

In Latin America, deserts are expanding and forcing people to move in both Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil, some 66 million hectares of land are affected, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, with a much larger share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of cropland now extends over 59 million hectares.

While desert expansion and water shortages are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future, given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. The numbers could eventually reach the hundreds of millions, offering yet another powerful reason for stabilizing both climate and population.

In the end, the issue with rising seas is whether governments are strong enough to withstand the political and economic stress of relocating large numbers of people while suffering heavy coastal losses of housing and industrial facilities.

During this century we must deal with the effects of trends -- rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas -- that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.


Adapted from Chapter 2, “Population Pressure: Land and Water,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009). Available online. Additional data and information sources at http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2009/pb4ch02_ss7

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As it has come to dominate the agenda for reshaping African agriculture over the years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been very careful not to associate itself too closely with patent-protected biotechnology as a panacea for African farmers.

True, the foundation named 25-year Monsanto veteran Rob Horsch to the position of "senior program officer, focusing on improving crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa."

Yet its flagship program for African ag, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), explicitly distances itself from GMOs. "AGRA does not fund the development of GMOs," the organization's Web site states.

But AGRA -- co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, proud sponsor of the original Green Revolution -- is just part of what Gates does around African ag. What precisely is the foundation getting up to over there? Is it pushing GMOs on African smallholder farms?

[I have a call into the foundation to ask directly about the role GMOs play in its efforts. I'll report on the response.]

It has been surprisingly hard to say. Until now.

In a speech at the World Food Prize gathering last week (see video below), Bill Gates himself chided the critics of GMOs -- and shed some sunshine on the foundation leadership's philosophy on ag development. At one point, he declared, "some of our grants [in Africa] do include transgenic approaches, because we believe they have the potential to address farmers' challenges more efficiently than conventional techniques."

Gates' speech seems like a significant event to me -- the World Food Prize website describes it as his "first major address on agriculture." One of the major knocks on the foundation's Africa efforts is the lack of democratic accountability and transparency. Since the foundation's careful message management makes it hard to figure out precisely what it's getting up to, I'm glad to see its leading light airing his views freely.

Gates opened with a standard-issue awestruck paean to Norman Borluag, recently deceased architect of the original Green Revolution. Gates delivered a rather unnuanced assessment of Borlaug's legacy. Gates declared: "He [Borlaug] proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor."

Really? To be sure, Borlaug's "dwarf" hybrid seed varieties, when coupled with the heavy fertilizer and pesticide doses they need to thrive, dramatically increased yields in the places where the Green Revolution took root -- the main success story being India.

But higher yields drive down crop prices -- and increased use of imported inputs requires the taking on of debt. Rather than boosting the fortunes of most farmers in its purview, the Green Revolution drove hundreds of thousands into ruin. The survivors consolidated land holdings. The big got bigger and the poor tended to leave the land -- too many of them ending up as excess labor in urban slum zones.

Maybe Gates didn't mean that Borlaug's efforts improved the lives of farmers, but rather the lives of non-farming urban dwellers. As he later says in the speech, also in the context of Borluag's legacy, "better farming can end hunger and poverty and lift whole countries out of poverty."

To be sure, many people were predicting famine for India in the 1960s, and the availability of cheap grain engendered by the Green Revolution no doubt forestalled widespread starvation. But it's demonstrably wrong to claim that the Green Revolution ended hunger and poverty in India.

Indeed, hunger rates remain appalling in India -- site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative success. From a 2008 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute:

According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 66 out of 88 nations (developing countries and countries in transition). Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh.[Emphasis added.]

The bit about India faring worse than "nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries" is particularly noteworthy, given that the Gates Foundation is explicitly spearheading a "new Green Revolution for Africa." Of course, the original Green Revolution in India lies in shambles -- the water table has been tapped near dry by massive irrigation projects in the zones where the Borlaug program took hold, and the remaining farmers there are struggling mightily with crushing debt loads and heightened pesticide-related cancer rates.

To be fair, Gates did point to "excesses" of the first Green Revolution, naming "too much irrigation and fertilizer" as examples. He vowed to avoid those mistakes in Africa. He insisted, more than once, that ecological sustainability was critical to the foundation's project. Yet he repeatedly emphasized that increasing gross production--the Borlaug project of squeezing as much yield out of a piece of land as possible -- was the key.

And that led him to the most fiery moment of his speech (if this dour man's demeanor can ever be described as "fiery"): the part where he denounced unnamed "environmentalists" who are somehow blocking GMO seeds from entering Africa.

"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates declared. He decried what he called a "false choice" between a "technological" approach geared to boosting productivity and an "environmental" one geared to sustainability. "We can have both," he said.

He went on: "Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment which is divorced from people and their circumstances. They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it, or what the farmers themselves might want."

The Gates Foundation, by contrast, isn't so demure. In an apparent reference to this project with GMO seed giant Monsanto, Gates allowed that "one of our [unnamed] private-sector partners" is working on a genetically modified drought-tolerant corn variety for African farmers. The seeds will be available to farmers royalty-free -- meaning that farmers will pay market price for the seeds themselves, but not pay the hefty biotech premium Monsanto normally slaps on top. It's unclear whether seed-saving will be allowed under the arrangement.

According to the above-linked press release, the magic seeds are expected to come online in 2018. Gates emphasized repeatedly that as climate change proceeds apace, greater and greater swaths of Africa will face persistent drought conditions. In pushing for drought-tolerant seeds, Gates is swinging for the fences -- looking for a single big solution to feed Africa's drought-stricken areas.

For me, this deal raises questions that cut to the heart of the Bill Gates approach to African ag.

First of all, it can't be noted often enough that a) GM agriculture's much-hyped ability to boost yields, taken as a given by Gates, has thus far proven purely spectral; b) there's serious evidence, despite a paucity of cash for critical research and heavy-handed control of research by seed companies, that GMOs cause health problems; and c) GMOs have so far proven quite proficient at generating unintended ecological consequences, such as the rise of "superweeds."

There's no room for any of that in Gates' discourse.

Further, I absolutely agree with Bill Gates that there's no zero-sum tradeoff between productivity and sustainability. But I urge him to tear his gaze away from the biotech lab and train it toward the field, where the best research on organic ag is being done. Indeed, one of the great benefits of organic farming is its long-term focus on soil health -- and healthy soils can increase productivity over time without massive ecological externalities.

Here's a summary of a 2005 paper published in Bioscience comparing yields of organic and conventional corn. The 22-year study compared yields of corn and soy for the following systems: 1) conventional chemical-based agriculture; 2) organic ag using manure for soil fertility; and 3) organic ag using "green manure" (nitrogen-fixing cover crops) for fertility. From the summary, here's the key nugget of the study:

"First and foremost, we found that corn and soybean yields were the same across the three systems," said [researcher David] Pimentel, who noted that although organic corn yields were about one-third lower during the first four years of the study, over time the organic systems produced higher yields, especially under drought conditions. The reason was that wind and water erosion degraded the soil on the conventional farm while the soil on the organic farms steadily improved in organic matter, moisture, microbial activity and other soil quality indicators. [Emphasis added.]

Note well the "especially under drought conditions" bit. Here is a technology for "drought-tolerant" corn that's ready right now -- no need to wait until 2018. It doesn't rely on the benevolence of Monsanto to waive a technology fee; and there are no questions about seed-saving. It asks no one to accept a drop in long-term productivity as the price paid for sustainability. And not only does it help farmers adapt to climate change with its drought-tolerant qualities, but it helps mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon. From the summary:

The fact that organic agriculture systems also absorb and retain significant amounts of carbon in the soil has implications for global warming, Pimentel said, pointing out that soil carbon in the organic systems increased by 15 to 28 percent, the equivalent of taking about 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per hectare out of the air.

Moreover, in a 2008 paper (PDF), the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) endorsed organic ag as a way to boost food security and improve farmer livelihoods in Africa. Concluded the FAO:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously ... Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress. [Emphasis added.]

Gates cash could go a long way in dispersing the skills and (relatively low-cost) equipment needed for effective organic farming in Africa. Why not, for example, fund a dramatic expansion of the Soil, Food, and Healthy Communities project that's proving so successful in Malawi?

So where's the Gates cash, and the fiery speech from the foundation's leader defending organic ag from its critics? Now, it's true that the Gates Foundation does fund research into alternative, low-input agriculture. Just this past spring, the foundation awarded $1.3 million to World Watch to study such techniques for improving ag productivity in Africa.

But let's look at funding levels. The above-mentioned Monsanto GMO corn project got $42 million from Gates -- and an additional $5 million from the Howard Buffet Foundation, run by the son of investor/insurance magnate Warren Buffet. The Worldwatch grant is loose change in comparison. (When I get a Gates official on the phone, i'll ask about other organic-style programs they're funding.)

Given the pro-high-technology thrust of Gates' speech, this imbalance is hardly surprising. As I took in the video of Gates' speech and heard him go on about the "needs of small farmers" and the critical role of biotech in serving those needs, I couldn't help but think of him as a kind of unelected agriculture commissioner for the African continent. And I wondered how many African farms will survive the embrace of the great software magnate.

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Rising sea levels are threatening the island homes of Mauritania's Imraguen fishermen. Above, child plays alongside flooded landscape on Nair Island.Tim Bromfield / Atlantic Rising

The Banc d'Arguin, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic in Mauritania, is a staging post for over two million exhausted migratory birds from Europe and Siberia. Terns dive for fish, dolphins raise curious heads to the terrestrial world and crabs promenade through an octopus's garden. This abundance is fed by the coastal upwelling, a wind-driven fountain of life bringing cooler, nutrient-rich water towards the ocean surface.

However, this unique ecosystem is threatened by sea level rise. Antonio Araujo, Director of La FIBA's (Fondation Internationale du Banc d'Arguin) conservation program, says "the catastrophe that is approaching us is a reality now." The Banc d'Arguin is so flat that it is impossible to hold the tides back, already there are visible impacts.

Nair, one of 14 low-lying islands in the Banc, is an important breeding site for spoonbills. In the last 10 years rising sea levels have reduced its size by half. Each year more than half the island's spoonbill nests are flooded and the eggs lost.

La FIBA has built a nesting platform above the high tide mark, but Araujo remains concerned; "it is difficult for ecosystems to survive such physical and biological stress."

The Imraguen fishermen are also affected. In 1997 spring tides divided their village, Iwik, in two. The school and four houses were lost and every year since the sea has eaten more. This is an added hardship in an already harsh environment. The Imraguen's closest source of drinking water is 45km away.

Araujo thinks the village will be forced to move in the next few years. The Imraguen will have to leave their boats unattended on the shore and suffer an additional workload, bringing their catch 500m inland everyday.

The Banc is an important nursery for a large number of species caught by the EU fleet and its loss would be devastating for the industry. Araujo stresses this is not an isolated problem for a remote community. There is no point investing in conservation projects in Europe without conserving birds' wintering grounds in the southern hemisphere. "If the Banc is lost, 40-50% of the waders of the Palaearctic will disappear," he says. Bird watching in Europe will never be the same again.

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Emile Azran stands in the sun in front of his sardine processing factory in Safi, Morocco, smoking a cigarette. Business is slow because it is the Eid holidays but soon he says the chimneys will be pumping at full steam again. The smell is putrid.

Sardines, once cheap foodstuff for the poor, have become a popular dish in Morocco. Mr. Azran’s factory, Almev, takes discarded sardine heads, tails and entrails from the canneries along the row at Safi and turns them into protein-rich animal feed. The flour-like substance is mixed with other feed and served up to contented chickens, turkeys, sheep and cows across Morocco.

The factory employs a workforce of 20 men. It is not work for the faint-hearted. The men spend hours a day knee-deep in sardines, shovelling them onto a conveyor belt, pressing water and oil out of the gloop and working alongside furnaces that fire at 1600°C. Most of his employees come from poor families, Mr. Azran tells us, and he runs the business as a social enterprise.

He describes the history of the sardine trade in the Atlantic over the last 100 years. As the cooler waters of the northern ocean have shifted south, temperature-sensitive sardine shoals have followed. The sardine industry has pursued the fish, moving down through Portugal and Morocco. Today the shoals have moved on again, passed Safi. The majority of the fishing fleet is now based further south in the Western Saharan ports of Laayoune and Dakhla.

Mr. Azran is sure that global warming has caused the migration of the sardines but is confident that it will not affect his business. For the moment, at least, the specialist knowledge and technology for processing the fish remains in Safi.  But the industry at Safi is completely dependent on the supply of sardines. If competition in the south makes it uneconomic for ships to continue delivering their catch, the industry will be forced to uproot again and follow the cooler waters and sardine shoals south.

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Djimon Hounsou at the U.N. Climate SummitPhoto: United NationsActor Djimon Hounsou is just as snacky in real life as he was on the big screen in Blood Diamond, The Island, and Gladiator.  Better yet, he's also a climate activist and humanitarian.

As a global ambassador for the aid and development group Oxfam, Hounsou has traveled in sub-Saharan Africa and seen the direct links between climate change and human suffering.  "I've witnessed firsthand devastation with drought," the Benin-born actor told reporters after he helped to kick off the U.N. Summit on Climate Change.  "Year after year, [local farmers are] still expecting the rain to come pretty much as it used to.  It's not coming.  So they have to adapt, with their crops and plantings." 

Not an easy proposition in a country like Mali, which Hounsou visited on a humanitarian mission.  The average income in this Western African nation is about $3.29 a day.

Often the communities Hounsou travels to know that something has gone wrong, says Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser.  "We held a climate hearing in Ethiopia a week or so ago.  One comment was ... 'For many many years, there were all varieties of birds here.  And now the birds are gone.'"

Signs like this are signals of a "profound change" for these communities, Offenheiser says, even if "they don't have all the information about what's happening, why it's happening, and what it means." 

"This is where the climate change story and the adaptation story become the human story," he continued. "It's about people, their lives, their livelihoods, and how they are going to change."

One of the major points of gridlock in this year's international climate-treaty negotiations is how the rich, industrialized nations are going to help the poorer developing nations adapt to and mitigate climate change -- while also continuing to send over the aid and development dollars they already provide for a host of other reasons. 

It is widely accepted now that the wealthy countries bear this responsibility; after all, they got fat and happy by creating the greenhouse-gas pollution that's now slow-cooking the Earth. But how much help should developed nations offer?  This is just one of the many contentious open questions to be addressed at December's climate-treaty talks in Copenhagen.

Oxfam estimates that wealthy nations need to come up with around $50 billion a year to help poorer nations adapt to global warming, and about another $100 billion a year to finance low-carbon development, so that these countries can ameliorate poverty without taking a coal-and-oil-fueled path to prosperity.

Hounsou hopes that if the citizens of wealthy nations better grasp the human costs of climate change, they will pressure their leaders to ante up. 

"We haven't engaged the world population into this issue yet," Hounsou says, noting that Western media in particular have not paid attention to the human component of global warming. 

Still, "no matter how you look at it, developing nations have to initiate the discussion at Copenhagen," he said.

Watch Hounsou at the U.N. Climate Summit: 

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A Saharawi fisherman on the beach north of Tarfaya in Morocco, just 70km from the Canary Islands.Tim Bromfield

Uniformed men patrol the beaches of southern Morocco at night. Their torches are trained on the Atlantic Ocean searching for boats overflowing with economic migrants heading for the Canary Islands.

From the beach just north of Tafaya, where we pitched camp, the windswept island of Fuertevetura is about 70 km off the African coast.

We met a fisherman who told us that some of the Nigerians, Mauritanians, Moroccans and others desperate enough to board these small boats succeeded in getting to Europe. Some, he said, get their papers and a few years later return home driving a car.

It can't be an easy journey. Others were not so lucky; the bodies of men, women and children regularly washed up on the beach. However, in the last two years, while the Forces Auxiliaires patrol the beaches, there have been fewer bodies.

Whether this means there are less people setting off on the journey or if they are just better equipped, it is difficult to say.

Climate change is likely to only increase the amount of people willing to risk this dangerous voyage. As desertification increases and lower rainfall makes farming less productive, life becomes more precarious for some Africans already living on the margin. In the future, perhaps more people will be inclined to try their luck in a leaky boat in the hope of a better and more prosperous life.

Europe is going to have to work hard to defend its borders against illegal immigrants whose livelihoods have been destroyed, in part, by a Western way of life.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been roundly criticized in sustainable-ag circles for throwing its considerable girth behind a "New Green Revolution for Africa."

According to critics (including me), the "green revolution" approach promotes high-tech, expensive solutions to Africa's agriculture woes -- ones more suited to the interests of a few agribusiness giants than millions of smallholder African farmers.

In a move that may be a response to such criticisms, the Gates Foundation recently announced it was awarding a $1.3 million, two-year grant to Worldwatch to look at low-cost, low-tech techniques for improving ag productivity in Africa. From the press release:

• Adding nitrogen-fixing plants into crop rotations as a low-cost solution for enriching soils and breaking weed and pest cycles;
• Overcoming freshwater shortages with rain harvesting, efficient irrigation, micro dams, and cover cropping;
• Strengthening local breeding capacity, including the use of farmer-run seed banks and genetic markers of important crop traits;
• Tapping international carbon-credit markets to reward farmers for enriching their soils and planting carbon-sequestering tree crops;
• Involving women farmers in decision-making at all levels.

Before we celebrate a new direction for the foundation, it should be noted that $1.3 million is a relatively miniscule sum for the nation's biggest philanthropy. By contrast, the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) awarded $164 million to the Alliance for a New Green Revolution for Africa. (That discrepency reflects the ratio of the research cash the USDA plows into organic ag vs. industrial ag.)

Next week, I'll be talking to people from Gates and Worldwatch to learn more about the new program.

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The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has already failed Africa, some observers believe, so why bother post-2012 when the existing CDM framework established under the Kyoto Protocol expires?

But as the international community prepares to negotiate a new climate pact, we should care about extending the CDM, and care a great deal.

After all, the CDM was created with the dual goals of promoting sustainable development in developing countries and reducing costs of compliance in regards to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in rich countries. In the early years of the CDM, the market rewarded the lowest hanging fruit -- reductions in industrial facilities in countries where there were already well-established investment environments and where government institutions were relatively well developed. It's no surprise then that most of the early projects were in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Malaysia and China.

Today the CDM has broadened to reach over 50 countries worldwide, including African nations like Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia. But we need to improve and extend the CDM to reach even more developing nations.

In 2007, while serving in my previous role as Global Head of Origination for EcoSecurities, I started focusing on business development in Africa. My first trip to scope out potential projects was to Tunisia, Ghana and Nigeria. Later we also evaluated opportunities in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, and from our South African office we tried to work with projects in countries as diverse as Rwanda, Mozambique, Mauritius, Madagascar, Namibia and Angola.

Despite our efforts, our African portfolio remains much smaller than one would expect given the resources devoted to it. Africa, we found, is a rather complicated place to work. First of all, it is extremely diverse and geographically huge. But, more importantly, the continents institutions are still in their infancy. Most African nations have only been independent for 50 years or less. As such, many governments have not evolved strong policymaking processes or had time to build the roads and rail networks needed to support economic development.

Slowly but surely, however, Africa is picking up. Unfortunately, the current debate on a post-Kyoto climate regime seems to be overlooking carbon financing as a tool for sustainable development, especially for Africa. The current debate tends to focus on competitiveness -- i.e. obtaining level playing fields for industries. But this approach insinuates that only major emerging economies matter in the fight against climate change, so only those that already possess developed industry and the money to set baselines and manage major schemes can aspire to benefit from carbon financing internationally.

People in developed countries often associate Africa with high-profile "bad news" stories, such as the political violence and economic collapse in Zimbabwe, the years-long wars in Congo, or even the horrors of 1994 Rwanda and today's Darfur. True, these are shocking and distressful facts, but they should not tarnish the substantial strides that other countries like Ghana, Botswana, Namibia and Ethiopia have made.

In the words of Youssou N'dour, one of the most well-known African singers who recently released a movie called "I bring what I love" (highly recommended by the way), developed countries need to move away from their idea that Africa is just a story of poverty and start expecting nations there to take care of their own development ... and make sure they have the flexibility to do so.

Africa needs more investment (not aid) to build businesses and infrastructure. Recently, there's been much discussion of aid's failure to help Africa's countries achieve certain development milestones. Carbon financing, I believe, can play an important role in boosting economic development and reducing corruption by channeling direct foreign investment to African nations for the right purposes.

Looking toward Copenhagen, it is not enough for Africa that the CDM simply continues past 2012. We need to recognize that:

The bad news is that we are out of time in the current Kyoto architecture, and it does not look like there will be a future for scalable carbon financing in Africa unless the United States also looks at climate change regulation as a force to promote sustainable development.

Let's encourage the United States and other developed nations to be more ambitious in Copenhagen and put on the table not only the idea of getting China and other key developing countries to agree on emissions targets, but also the idea of reinforcing the role of CDM and pushing for much needed reforms of the mechanism addressing Africa's challenges.

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After thirteen years and countless hours by lawyers, community members, and activists around the world, Royal Dutch Shell finally settled the Wiwa v Shell case in a New York court for $15.5 million.

Plaintiffs in the case, which included Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., and the families of other Ogoni men hanged in November 1995, charged that the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, and the former chief of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni had been protesting Shell's decades of pollution of their Niger Delta homeland, a practice that sadly continues to this day.

Shell says they settled the case as a "humanitarian gesture" to the Ogoni.  Does anyone really believe that after fighting for more than a decade to keep this out of court, Shell suddenly woke up and felt great compassion for the Ogoni?  Please.

Writing in the Daily Beast, Joe McGinniss asked "how much is a dead Nigerian worth to Shell"?  It's a perfectly legitimate question to ask, especially when you consider that Royal Dutch Shell is a corporation that made more than $30 billion in profits last year alone.

Its also more than a bit unfair.  Not to Shell - who cares about them?  But to the families of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other executed Ogoni men, McGinniss' article is insensitive to the reality of trying to find closure on a painful episode in their lives.

As Ken Wiwa Jr. wrote eloquently in the Guardian, "the case [was] freighted with all kinds of agendas that it [could not] possibly satisfy".   Has the settlement brought relief to Ken Wiwa jr and the families of the other men who were executed?   The answer from them is an unequivocal yes.  That alone should be cause for celebration, and they alone get to be the judges of what is adequate for that.

Is $15.5 million is enough to compensate for the hanging of nine men, the death of thousands more, and for the destruction of an ecosystem?  No of course not.  One wonders what amount of money would ever be enough for that. 

But was $15.5 million on par with what a jury would have awarded in this case?  Yes, lawyers tell me, for sure. 

The reality is Shell settled because they were scared, and they knew the evidence against them was overwhelming.  They publicly say they had nothing to do with the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni, and yet there were documents and video that they fought hard to keep out of the public eye.

Evidence that was to be introduced in the case included an internal Shell memo where the head of Shell Nigeria offered to intervene on Saro-Wiwa's behalf, if only Saro-Wiwa and others would stop claiming that Shell had made payments to the military.

Then there was this memo, requesting payment to the Nigerian military for an incident in which at least one Ogoni man died.

Witness were set to testify that they saw Shell vehicles transporting Nigerian soldiers, that they saw Shell employees conferring with the military, that they saw money being exchanged between Shell employees and military officers, and that they heard military officers, including Major Okuntimo of the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force, make admissions regarding the work they were doing on behalf of Shell.

We have known of Shell's involvement in this tragedy for a long time.  In early May of 1994, Ken Saro-Wiwa Sr. faxed me a memo authored by Major Okuntimo which read "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence" and further called for "pressure on oil companies for prompt regular inputs". 

I received that fax and immediately called Ken, who was in London at the time.  He said "this is it.  They're going to kill us all.  All for Shell."  It was the last time I talked with him.  He returned to Nigeria (an incredibly brave thing to do), and was shortly arrested on the trumped up charges for which he was ultimately hanged.

Ken Sr.'s famous last words from the gallows were "lord take my soul but the struggle continues".  In this moment, perhaps more than ever before, we need to heed that call to action.  The settlement in this case brings satisfaction to the plaintiffs for an event that happened 14 years ago. It in no way, shape or form excuses or absolves Shell of their ongoing destruction of the Niger Delta environment  

One of the central complaints of Niger Delta communities for forty years is gas flaring, which sends plumes of toxic pollutants into the air and water of the Niger Delta. Gas flaring endangers human health, harms local ecosystems, emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases, wastes vast quantities of natural gas, and is against Nigerian law.  Shell does it nowhere else in the world in volumes that are even remotely comparable to what they flare in the Delta.

But Shell is still flaring gas with reckless abandon in Nigeria.

While there is no doubt that the settlement represented a significant victory for the plaintiffs' in this one  human rights case against Shell, true justice will not be served as long as the people of Nigeria continue to suffer the terrible impact of Shell's operations.  Shell estimates it would cost about $3 billion - only 10% of just their last year's profits - to end Shell's gas flaring in Nigeria once and for all.

But instead of putting their great "humanitarian concern" into action, Shell points the finger at the Nigerian government and demands that they pay to end this practice.

Shell also is at great pains to prove their corporate concern for climate change, and yet they are actually the world's most carbon intensive oil company.   A significant reason for that is their ongoing gas flaring in Nigeria, which according to the World Bank is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa's coal sector), contributing the equivalent of at least 10 million cars annually.  Another reason is that they are the largest holder of tar sands leases in Canada.

Send a message to Shell's CEO Jeroen van der Veer, and let him know that if he really wants to prove his great concern for the Ogoni people, not to mention the climate, he'll end gas flaring once and for all.

The struggle continues.

(A version of this post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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Jim Motavalli of E/Environmental Magazine has a piece in Foreign Policy (!) on the difficulties we face in lowering meat consumption on any significant scale:

So how will we become a vegetarian planet? The numbers suggest that we won't stop eating meat simply because it's "the right thing to do." People love it too much. Instead, we'll be forced to stop. By 2025, we simply won't have the resources to keep up the habit. According to the FAO report, 33 percent of the world's arable land is devoted to growing crops for animal feed, and grazing is a major factor in deforestation around the world. It's also incredibly water-intensive. The average U.S. diet requires twice the daily amount of water as does an equally nutritious vegetarian diet, reports the Worldwatch Institute. Meanwhile, there will be more than 8 billion people on this earth, and two-thirds of the world's population will live in water-stressed regions.

There may thus be some irony in the possibility that Africa's meat consumption could head up by necessity as ours heads down. A new report paints a bleak picture for African ag:

Using climate models, they determined that if carbon emissions remain high by 2050, the number of reliable crop growing days would fall below 90 for almost 1 million square kilometers of arid and semi-arid lands in Africa.

With fewer carbon emissions, the number of growing days would still fall below 90 for some 500,000 square kilometers (124 million acres), the study found.

Maize, the most widely grown staple crop in Africa, "will basically no longer be possible" to cultivate with fewer than 90 days to grow, the study said.

Even millet, a staple grain in Africa considered to be a drought-tolerant crop, would be at risk of crop failure in areas unable to meet the 90-day mark, the researchers found., authored by the livestock insitute, admittedly a biases source, paints an interesting picture of the future of agriculture on the African continent.

The study goes on to observe that cattle could still thrive on land too dry and hot for crops. If you pasture them, that is, since the whole point is that you couldn't grow feed grains on that land anymore. Now, I don't take this study's assertion at face value since it was done by the International Livestock Research Institute, which, though funded by governments and the UN (along with other "private sector entities") clearly has in interest in promoting, you know, livestock.

And of course, their analysis for what qualifies as a "reliable crop growing day" would depend on the style of agriculture. Still, there's no denying that Africa is going to get hotter and drier. I don't think you'll see land like that supporting CAFOs, but small-scale, possibly subsistence level, livestock farming may remain common there at the same time as Western prices for meat go through the roof. If nothing else, this is worth some more attention.

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A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

The failure of governments in both rich and poor countries to prioritize basic sanitation is killing thousands of children every day, according to two reports released today by international aid agencies WaterAid and PATH. And a third report released yesterday suggests that the global economic crisis may increase the death rate, at least in Africa.

Public toilets in the developing world are fairly uncommon. Those that are available often fall into disrepair and disuse. Above, one of the glitzier example of public plumbing in the slums of Delhi, India.Kevin FergusonAll three reports offered this constructive advice: Promote access to drinking water, sanitation and hygiene together as part of national health care agendas. "It's just unfathomable that so little development aid is going to stop this enormous global killer," says John Sauer, communications director for Water Advocates, a nonprofit group that works with PATH and WaterAid. "There's no excuse not to prioritize funding for very simple, low-cost interventions. This is solvable."

The World Health Organization estimates that 28 percent of the 9.7 million children who die before the age of 5 every year do so because of poor sanitation and unsafe water. Ironically, that death rate may climb because "the recent and positive focus on ... the delivery of health services" does not included preventative measures, such as providing proper sanitation, states the WaterAid report.

The WaterAid report does not call for diarrhea-prevention and treatment to be given preference over other diseases, just that it be included in the mix.

Likewise, the PATH report, titled Diarrheal Disease: Solutions to Defeat a Global Killer, notes that over the last decade, momentum has slowed, with declines in research and funding commitments and competing global health priorities. "The perceived lack of urgency and taboo nature of the illness may have also contributed to the current low level of awareness surrounding the issue," states the PATH report.

Diarrhea, linked directly to unclean water and poor sanitation, is the second-biggest killer of young children, after acute respiratory infections, according to the WHO. That makes diarrhea, causing 17 percent of these deaths, more deadly than measles, malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, says WHO. When acute respiratory infections are factored in -- hand washing with soap and clean water greatly reduces the incidence of respiratory infections, according to a 2005 report published in The Lancet -- the mortality rate climbs to about 40 percent.

The reports did offer some good news. Some countries have learned to coordinate water and sanitation programs, says the WaterAid report: "Senegal is an example of a country that has got it right. The distribution of tasks and responsibilities between these structures was decided by an inter-ministerial decree, and the system is functioning well." Ethiopia and Uganda have made some progress, as well, says the report.

Other evidence backs up these findings. For example, in Uganda, a six-month program to improve drinking water in the Soroti District found that households that obtained access to clean drinking water were more likely to improve their sanitation and hygiene practices as well. The Safe Drinking Water for Uganda (SDWU) pilot project, funded by Proctor and Gamble (P&G), and implemented by Population Services International and Africare from December 2007 through May 2008, "had a spill-over effect on other non-direct beneficiaries, who also adopted the hygiene practices promoted by the project," according to Ruth Mufute, a regional director with Africare and author of the report. The project's goal was to reduce the incidence of waterborne diseases among 1,500 persons by promoting the use of P&G's PuR water disinfectant and better hygiene. However, lack of funding to support such projects means that residents typically revert to old habits, such as drinking from tainted wells, she says.

The fallout from the global financial crisis poses an additional impediment to expanding access to clean water, according to a report issued by AfricanEconomicOutlook.org, a coalition of intergovernmental agencies. The continent's economic outlook has turned "decisively negative," it said. "Growth in emerging economies is also expected to slow dramatically," states the report. Economic growth in Africa is expected to be only 2.8 per cent in 2009, less than half of the 5.7 percent estimated for 2008.

The economic downturn could well impact childhood health. In central Africa, childhood mortality increased by 13 percent from 1991 to 2007. However, some countries with initially high mortality rates made remarkable progress in reducing childhood mortality, the report states. "A number of countries, even poor ones, have displayed noteworthy performances (Eritrea, Malawi and Namibia), raising the possibility that progress is possible with political will, adequate resources and targeted strategies," states the report, which links poverty, poor sanitation and high rates of childhood mortality.

--

What WaterAid suggests to reduce childhood deaths:

1. All national health plans should confirm clear links between country health information systems, particularly disease prevalence data, and the process of planning and budgeting.

2. All countries should have a mechanism for inter-ministry coordination on reducing child mortality, with a joint agenda to deliver relevant strategies.

3. All national health plans should contain an adequate strategy for environmental health.

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Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?

Wanted: Young cane cutters for part time seasonal work. Must be willing to work ten hours a day swinging a machete in tropical sun while wearing gloves, long sleeved shirt, and hat -- no retirement benefits (because you won't live that long). Apply within.

The comment below ElMarto's photo on Flickr titled "Truck Shadow Escape" reads:

Adam Welz lives in South Africa. Last year he drove to Massingir Mozambique to see first-hand the impacts of a scheme to grow sugarcane for ethanol. The article describing what he found appeared in the latest issue of Mother Jones. I typed "Massinger" into Google Earth to get a feel for the area. I found forest and savanna crisscrossed with dirt roads and livestock trails.

The good news:

The sugarcane plantation will employ 2,000 people.

The bad news:

Mozambique's population (where the total fertility rate is five children per woman) grows by that much every two days. With eventual mechanization the number of employed will drop to 400. As a means of reducing poverty, cane ethanol is a drop in a very large bucket. Industrial agriculture provides very few jobs per square mile. The fix for African poverty remains elusive, but industrial agriculture is unlikely to be the answer.

Weltz discovered that the same land had been promised by the inept and corrupt government to several groups of people in addition to Bioenergy Africa, the company planning to grow cane and make ethanol. We all know who will win that struggle.

Global warming is about the destruction of the Earth's biosphere. Destroying more of the biosphere with industrial agriculture just accelerates that destruction. This project will consume nearly 75,000 acres of native woodland and savanna.

The article concludes with Adam presenting a possible scenario to ProCana's Corné Holtzhausen:

Consumers my butt, I did not ask to have ethanol blended into my gas. How long are we going to let our governments get away with this?

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