With the global integration of markets and cultures over the past few decades, the concepts of human rights and democracy can no longer be considered apart from the economics of inequality. Of the Four Freedoms articulated by Roosevelt in 1941, Freedom from Want is still a dream for at least half of the world population. When the Universal Declaration marks its 60th Anniversary in December, there will therefore be little to celebrate. We live in a time defined by the most dissolute world records: there are more billionaires today than ever before, a number crossing into four figures for the first time — 1,125. There are more millionaires today than ever, passing 10 million for the first time last year and adding an extra zero to the tally — “10.1 million millionaires”.

We also have the largest urban population in human history, with the number of slum-dwellers worldwide now breaking the one billion mark. At the same time, we had record harvests this summer in all of the emerging BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — as well as a record cereal crop in the United States, while the number of hungry people increased by 100 million to reach close to a billion people.

It is an age of the crudest paradoxes: unbelievable wealth amidst implausible penury; record levels of food amidst spiraling levels of hunger; and the paradox of rising economic growth alongside rising levels of poverty. What this indicates is that there is more than enough wealth to go around, there is enough food being produced to feed everyone sufficiently, and there are enough resources for everyone to enjoy at least a minimal standard of living. The problem in its simplest form is one of equity and distribution: we do not use the world’s resources wisely, and we do not share the world’s resources with those who need them most. The world crisis in its essence is so simple that even a child could both understand it and comprehend its absurdity.

This perverse bias in global priorities became palpably clear during the recent global financial crash. People everywhere began to ask: why is it that the governments of the world can summon several trillion dollars to bail out millionaire bankers, and yet no government can afford the money — just $30 billion dollars a year – that would be enough to bail out the world’s hungry?

There is barely a week that now goes by without another high-level report being released about growing inequality, increasing destabilization and insecurity, or dramatically rising poverty and hunger — and these problems are by no means confined to the poorest countries. To quote a few examples from just the last couple of weeks: the United States, the wealthiest country in the world which led the globalization of markets over the past few decades, now has the largest gap between its wealthiest and poorest households out of all the 30 OECD countries after Mexico and Turkey.

According to another study, the lives of millions of working poor families in the US has gotten worse since 2002, with 350,000 more working families slipping into poverty, and 42 million working adults and their children rendered too poor to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. The economic freedom promised through the liberalization of market forces has, in reality, resulted in a freedom for the very few and a contradiction of the core free-market promise — that increased wealth will be shared.

Not all of this is bad news. Just as citizen movements have long recognized the blindness, injustice and unsustainability of the current economic system, they have simultaneously held the vision of a better world in which a true form of democracy is secured universally alongside basic human rights. Just as the names for the prevailing market-led ideology are legion, the names for this better world are numerous too; it’s being variously called economic democracy, living democracy, earth democracy, democratic mundialization, or simply alter-globalization — with all of its component off-shoots including water democracy, food democracy or food sovereignty. Common to all of the proposals is a vision far greater than merely the institutions and multiple parties of political democracy, but a world in which everyone has a say in their own future, in which the right to life’s essentials are universally protected.

The necessary self-determination and self-expression in determining how one’s life will be lived, which is the basis of true democracy or liberty, does not exist in any real sense anywhere in the world. Today, more and more people are being cut out of the decision-making process over life’s basic essentials, while the corporate monopolization of the world’s resources continues to accelerate. The persistence of hunger and extreme poverty in a world of excess and plenty is all the evidence that a true form of democracy has yet to be realized.

One sudden sign of hope and change is the dramatic shift of intellectual opinion this year following the convergence of food, fuel and financial crises. Even a few months ago, the phrases ‘nationalization’ or ‘government intervention’ would have been anathema to world leaders. Now, as the global financial system continues to fall apart, there is widespread talk amongst Presidents and Prime Ministers of enacting a new world order, a “new form of capitalism” or a “new global economic and financial architecture.” Multilateral institutions like the IMF and WTO are standing accused, along with the G-7 nations, of having misgoverned the world economy. Some have likened the international banking crisis to an economic equivalent of the collapse of the Soviet Union, with much talk of replacing the existing institutions with new forms of global governance – leading to the prospect of a ‘Bretton Woods II’ summit being held later this month.

The two most important questions that remain are nothing new for the burgeoning ranks of the world’s disenfranchised poor. Firstly, will any changes made to the financial system continue to be in favour of the 20% of the world population who, since the 1960s, have consistently forged ahead of the majority world — the fortunate 20% in the richest countries who consume at least 86% of the world’s goods. Or will the rich nations finally deliver some measure of socio-economic justice to the more than three billion people, almost half of the world, who continue to survive on less than $2.50 a day? Secondly, will intergovernmental policy remain in the hands of the major industrial powers and the international institutions they control — or will their rule-making, instead of prioritizing a secure environment for open markets, finally make the necessary countervailing rules to protect human rights and human development?

A political and economic transformation of this scale is not going to happen by itself. The top 1% who control most of the world’s resources are not going to give up their power and privileges without resistance. Organized political activism is responsible for the degree of democracy we have today — from universal adult suffrage and women’s rights, to trade unions and civil liberties — but the calls are now ringing out for a new alliance of the global justice movement, a united voice that can connect together all the human rights activists, environmentalists, global justice campaigners, NGOs and concerned citizens worldwide.

This voice has already begun to emerge, as evidenced in the almost constant demonstrations taking place throughout the world, characterized most often by peaceful protest and an informal consensus against rife injustice. As one example, in mid-October the global call to action against poverty saw the “biggest mobilization ever on a single issue”, with 116 million people taking part in demonstrations around the world. It’s one more sign of hope and change, an indication of the basin of goodwill and the unified consciousness that is already present in the world.

The intensity of this international phenomenon is still in its infancy, however, and unaware of its concerted power to affect policy changes at the international level. The most common name for this new force is simply world public opinion, dubbed a ‘new superpower’ in world affairs that cannot be directed by any imposed authority, that includes all ages and walks of life, and that is altogether beyond the ‘people power’ political protests of the past 20 years. It’s in this way that the concept of sharing has the potential to become a rallying call that can unite people under a single banner, to provide a truly democratic platform with a select petition of demands that can pressure governments and world leaders to completely reorder their priorities. Another name for it is ‘democracy in action’, and it is here that we all hold an urgent responsibility.

Could it be that the interlinked crises in food, energy and financial markets indicate the commencement of a terminal decline in the export-led, free market development model that has defined the past few decades of globalization? Or will the emergency in food provision, as previously happened in 1974, reinforce the same policies in favor of large-scale industrial farming that have already devastated rural communities throughout the developing world?

The inability of world leaders to face up to the root causes or policy contradictions of a food crisis is nothing new. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, mass protests over a recurring food crisis in developing countries were popularly known as “IMF riots”, although the solutions — as today — were handed to the very structures that caused those crises.

The Ethiopian famine during the 1980s led not to initiatives that helped sustain poor rural dwellers, but rather the dedication of good land to export crops under the tutelage of the World Bank, thus further exacerbating food insecurity and storing up a repeat of the famine situation that is surfacing today. In Peru in August 1990, following the dictats of the IMF, fuel prices increased 30 times overnight, and bread prices increased 12 times within a day. In Caracas, 1989, after a 200 percent increase in the price of bread, anti-IMF riots led to the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.¹

More examples could be repeated ad infinitum. Compared to the last major food and fuel crisis of 1973/4, which culminated in similarly vain promises from the FAO’s first World Food Conference to end hunger and prevent a repeat occurrence, the needed lessons after 34 years are far from being acknowledged.

The main difference today is in the parting of extremes, or the deepening polarization between alternative paradigms, narratives and solutions. On one side of the court stand the impassioned NGOs and hardened campaigners who have long opposed large-scale agribusiness in place of food sovereignty, bottom-up development, and the empowerment of small farmers through local and regional markets. The food price crisis, they say, has exposed the disaster of global agricultural production and the conclusive failure of a market fundamentalist ideology left unchecked for far too long.

On the other side of the court, supported by Gordon Brown, George W. Bush, Bill Gates’ pockets and the most powerful financial institutions in the world, stand the Green Revolutionaries led by chemical technologies and multinational corporations from the E.U and U.S.A. One path, say almost all of the NGOs, will lead to social justice, the strengthening of local communities and food security for all, while the current path is inherently unsustainable, responsible for continued hunger in a world of plenty, and incapable of ending poverty.

By 2008 it should be a platitude to state that the escalating global food crisis, which some NGOs are pointedly distinguishing as the “food price crisis,” is the inevitable long-term consequence of misguided economic policies and a disastrous free market restructuring of agricultural land. The official version of history over the past few decades as interpreted by G8 governments, however, could not be more different. In the World Bank’s latest World Development Report 2008 on agriculture, the same model of development that has created a global crisis in food production in the first place — import liberalization, elimination of tariffs, a dependency on cash crops, GMO seeds and fertilizers, and all other measures that work in favor of agribusiness and against the millions of small-scale farmers struggling against poverty and hunger – is being promoted as the only solution.² The $1.2 billion of extra loans as part of the World Bank’s ‘Global Food Crisis Response Facility’ will be handed out with the same underlying conditions of further trade liberalization and market reforms.

Likewise, the IMF used the crisis to augment its existing arrangements under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), attaching the same conditions requiring structural adjustment to the 10 countries, mostly in Africa, already forced to make new agreements.³ The World Trade Organization similarly tried to capitalize on the crisis by working to increase its mandate through the Doha Round of trade agreements, alongside a push to persuade developing countries to further liberalize their financial sectors under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).⁴ Between the expert rhetoric and analysis by international financial institutions on the catastrophic extent of the crisis, with even the IMF declaring that some countries are at “tipping point,”⁵ their proffered medicine is still being mixed with the same deep-seated poisons.

This basic contradiction of agreeing to increase agricultural production in developing countries to address the plight of small and poor farmers, while promoting policies that achieve the opposite ends, was set in stone after the UN’s emergency food summit held in Rome. The final declaration made no attempt to address the structural problems and deeper causes of the crisis, as evidenced in key paragraph 7(e) that concluded: “We encourage… efforts in liberalizing international trade in agriculture by reducing trade barriers and market distorting policies.”⁶ A rare mention of small farmers was only made in reference to international markets, underlining the continued prioritizing of market fundamentalism and trade over food security.⁷ A renewed commitment was made to reduce by half the number of undernourished people by 2015, but after 45 years of similar promises one NGO called this “the big lie” that no-one at the Summit believes will happen.⁸

Despite both Ban Ki-moon and Jacques Diouf’s impassioned speeches and articles over the period of the Summit, neither of them sought to address the entrenched structural origins of the food crisis. Most worrying was Ban’s simplistic prescriptions for improved market efficiency and a 50 percent rise in food production by 2030 to meet rising demand⁹, thus playing into the hands of politicians who seek to divert political debate away from the role of agribusinesses in the current food crisis, as well as the corporations who wish to accelerate a “Doubly Green Revolution” in agriculture as propounded by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The inevitable result, without a critical re-examination of the unsustainable manner in which food is produced and distributed, will be more of the same; more privatization, more corporate monopolization of food systems, more GMO crop initiatives, more displacement of poor farmers, more migration into cities and slums, more hunger, more poverty, more overconsumption and obesity. And all this without even considering the environmental footprint of producing more food on less available land, or transporting more food through international markets which contradicts the urgent need of reducing CO2 emissions. The search for technical fixes to produce cheap and abundant food may have made sense in the 1940s, but 70 years of the “productionist” model has led to the vital challenge of defining a sustainable diet — one that recognizes the central crisis of distribution and overcomes the co-existence of under-, over- and mal-consumption in a world defined by extremes of inequality.¹⁰ Not even Ban Ki-moon, it seems, was able to acknowledge the most basic contradiction of all: that already we are producing more than enough food.

There are signs, however, that the world direction is changing course. As a knee-jerk response to skyrocketing food price inflation, those developing governments fortunate enough to have export stocks began pulling out of the global market to safeguard their domestic prices. The failure of the Doha round of trade negotiations, which sought to further liberalize agricultural markets, was widely interpreted as recalcitrance on the part of developing countries — and the issue of agriculture, in the light of the food crisis, was cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse.

The only source of good to emerge from spiraling food price inflation is the resultant crisis of faith amongst poorer and developing countries in neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Unlike the crisis of 1970s stagflation that signaled the end for the Keynesian social-democratic model, 2008 could be marked down in history for setting in motion an opposite trend. A notable example of this gradual shift in economic thinking is set down in the UN’s latest World Economic and Social Survey (WESS), released a week before the G8 Summit. A belief in the self-regulating market is no longer credible, was the Report’s message, noting that “John Maynard Keynes, until recently persona non grata in policy circles, is once again the ‘defunct economist’ to consult.”¹¹

Such an acknowledgement of the redistribution agenda is no longer confined to renegade economists exempt from mainstream discussion. Although the food price crisis has failed to serve as a wake-up call to world leaders, a crucial international debate has started to emerge on the whole theology of food security. For now, the redundant model of export-led agriculture and import dependency has won through, but the calls for people-led social change are rapidly achieving a long-awaited consensus.

1. Examples taken from Michel Chossudovsky. The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Global Research, 2003)
2. World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (World Bank, 19 October 2008)
3. “World Bank and IMF Emergency Loans: A Cure or a Curse for the Food Crisis?” (Eurodad, 17 June 08)
4. Myriam Vander Stichele. I”gnoring the crises? How further GATS liberalisation impacts the financial and food crises” (South Centre Bulletin, 18 June 2008)
5. “IMF fears food prices may stir economic mayhem” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2 July 2008)
6. Declaration of the High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The challenges of climate change and bioenergy (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 5 June 2008)
7. Ibid, see paragraph 6(a).
8. Ciao FAO: Another “Failure-as-Usual” Food Summit (Action group on erosion, technology and concentration – etc. Translator. Volume 5, No.1 June 2008)
9. Ban Ki-moon. “The New Face of Hunger” (Washington Post, 12 March 2008)
10. “Interview with Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University in London” (GRAIN, Seedling Magazine, July 2008)
11. World Economic and Social Survey 2008: Overcoming Economic Insecurity (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2 July 2008) p 6.

Contradicting the Bank’s celebrated decline in extreme poverty figures last year which fell to less than a billion for the first time, the new measurements revealed a far less optimistic outlook — a total of 1.4 billion poor people in 2005, up from 986 million people in 2004. A margin of error, in other words, of 42 percent, defining a quarter of the developing world as living without sufficient means for human survival.

Despite this, the World Bank keenly stressed that poverty eradication continues to improve. It does not mean that the plight of the poor has worsened, we are told, only that the plight is now better understood. The lack of almost any critical news coverage implied that the rest of the world was inclined to agree. Does it really matter, after all, where the line is drawn in the sand, or how the number crunchers add up their figures? Is the question of poverty measurement not merely academic?

In fact, the revised figures are of crucial importance to not only the cause for global justice, but also our understanding of the world over the past quarter century of globalization. The World Bank, as the near exclusive provider of global poverty figures, uses the statistics to defend its policies of deregulation, privatization, market liberalization, and increased economic growth through free trade as the overruling means to combating poverty. Despite a long history of controversy, the figures still hold an almost uncontested authority with governments, NGOs and the popular media who frequently cite the estimates as evidence that neoliberal policies and globalization have reduced global poverty. This makes it doubly surprising that the Bank’s spin on the new figures have been so readily accepted and hardly questioned.

The figures for 2005 at the $1.25 baseline, no matter how the statistics are tailored, paint a dismal picture of mass destitution; 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty is equivalent to roughly four times the entire population of the U.S., an inconceivable number to envisage. In Africa, the number of poor people has near doubled since figures began in 1981, with still half the population of sub-Saharan Africa living below the poverty line. In India, 200 million people in extreme poverty effectively fell through the cracks of the World Bank’s headcount whilst the statisticians learned how to ‘improve’ their tallies. Revisions to China’s figures were similarly dramatic, up to 207 million from a previous 130 million people in extreme poverty.

When considering that China did not follow neoliberal policies, it is doubtful that the Bank can take any credit for China’s remarkable success in reducing poverty during the 1990s. As the Bank states, China’s success still accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in extreme poverty. If China is therefore removed from the equation, the most damning conclusion from the new figures becomes clear: the number of poor in the developing world has remained almost the same, at about 1.2 billion, over the period of globalization between 1981 and 2005.

This fact alone places the Bank’s hailing of a dramatic percentage reduction in poverty over 25 years into a different light. At the very least, it calls into question their confidence in declaring that “there has been strong — if regionally uneven — progress toward reducing overall poverty.” At most, it underlines the fact that globalization has been largely ineffective at either reducing the burgeoning ranks of the world’s poor, or including this vast swathe of the global population into the mainstream economy.

The Colombia University economist Sanjay Reddy, one of the Bank’s foremost critics on this topic, has stated his view that the individuals directly involved have approached the exercise in a sincere fashion, and are persons of the utmost integrity. That said, the Bank has already undertaken two previous revisions of the base year for calculating purchasing power rates, wreaking havoc to its poverty estimates each time. When employing the aggregate headcount, previous development indicators revealed that global poverty increased between 1990 and 2001 in the number of $2 a day poor, from 2.65 billion to 2.74 billion.

The Bank’s assumption that the Millennium Development Goals on poverty and hunger will still be reached are now starkly contradicted. According to a separate study by the Bank, an extra 100 million people could fall into extreme poverty due to soaring food and energy prices. This means that an extra half a billion people in total are now thought to be struggling for survival compared to previous estimates. On current trends, at least a billion people will still live below the $1.25 a day line in 2015, including a third of the world’s poor who will live in Africa. Only China is currently on target to achieve the goals, reports the Bank, while most other countries are not. As shown by other independent studies, this is an understatement: without urgent action the world could see hunger doubling instead of halving by 2015.

This cursory analysis of the Bank’s statistics is meant only to emphasize an obvious and, since the release of the widely uncriticized new data, a remarkably neglected point: that the World Bank’s poverty figures are no longer indicative of any real improvement in the plight of the poor — even by their own measures. As the latest figures graphically illustrate, almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Altogether, the Bank reports no change in the number of people living below $2 a day, at around 2.5 billion between 1981 and 2005. And it is unlikely, they warned, that the number of extremely poor will drop below one billion again before 2015. The distinction between the haves and have-nots could not get any clearer.

The World Bank’s disregard of its basic deficiencies in analyzing poverty is ultimately not surprising. After all, the Bank makes no disguise of its uncompromising belief in economic growth through unfettered markets as the strongest antidote to poverty, ignoring all signs since the 1980s that wealth has failed to trickle down to the poorest of the poor. More surprising, however, is the lack of external scrutiny of the Bretton Woods institutions in the formulation and usage of global poverty figures, and the lack of criticism on what those figures reveal.

With dire weather events and studies being reported on an almost daily basis, fewer sceptics are able to dismiss the reality of dangerous climate change. In the same week as around 1,000 diplomats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists from 158 countries attended the U.N.’s Vienna Climate Change Talks, a top security think-tank stated that climate change could have global security implications “on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken” [2], whilst leading scientists warned of a looming “global food crisis” that will require more food to be produced over the next 50 years than has been produced during the past 10,000 years combined. [3]

The rapidity of these dystopian predictions has grown to Faustian proportions; the year 2007 already has the dubious accolade of witnessing the most extreme weather events on record,[4] as characterised by the millions of Africans just hit by some of the worst floods in a generation in which villagers were “wiped off the map”. [5] This summer, the collapse of the Arctic ice cap (losing a third of its ice since measurements began 30 years ago and “stunning” experts)[6] was topped off by the latest UN study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who now believe that the tipping point for widespread catastrophe – involving a two degrees rise in global temperatures – is “very unlikely” to be avoided. [7]

Common Sense

Common sense would presume that the resulting questions for policymakers, long since removed from a debate on mans culpability, must inevitably focus on how to achieve a wholesale reorganisation of society to drastically decrease fossil fuel use, curb excessive consumption, and reform the global economic framework to ensure that all countries can live sustainably within ecological limits. The collective government response to date, however, makes it seem like the countless thousands of lives being destroyed by flash floods, famines and desertification are living in a parallel world to the business-as-usual dealings of multinational corporations.

The stalemate reached during the Vienna talks reiterates the ongoing blindness to climate change reality demonstrated by government leaders. China, which continues to open up two coal-fired power plants a week, refuses to cut emissions if it means sacrificing economic growth, compared with the US senior climate negotiator who said that the E.U.’s goal of slashing emissions to half of 1990 levels by 2050 would “be a very tough target to meet” [8] — even though the IPCC determine that an 80 percent reduction in ‘global’ greenhouse-gas emissions is needed before 2050.

At the same time as Japan, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and Russia all argued that the level of emissions cuts required should “be kept open” [9], a Worldwatch Institute report was released that showed more wood was removed from forests in 2005 than ever before, more steel and aluminium was produced in 2006 than in previous world records, and inconceivable billions of tonnes of fossil fuels and oil are increasingly being consumed. [10] The more urgent and fundamental question, therefore, is what factors continue to drive this one way ticket towards ecological disaster, and what social measures really need to be taken if cataclysmic global warming is to be forestalled?

Limits to Growth

The framing of this basic enquiry into environmental sustainability can be traced back to a report published in 1972 that forecast the imminent collapse of life on earth and resulted in an outrage amongst economic thinkers. Limits to Growth, written by leading scientists from the then unknown Club of Rome, used crude mathematical models to project future resource depletion that have long since been discredited, even if it’s essential repudiation of the modern belief in economic growth as “a kind of law of nature” is more relevant today than when it was first published. [11] The observational problem, outlined the report, is that the planet has limited resources and a finite carrying capacity, while the demands placed on it by a growth-dependent economy and the grossly materialistic lifestyles it engenders are insatiable. For this reason, the belief that free trade will lead “to a natural order of things” is catastrophically mistaken, it argued, as there are in fact “no laws of economic ordination” because economics “is not really a science but a set of theories,” and because the ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market does not actually exist. [12]

This challenge to orthodox thinking on development was further underlined by the respected economist E. F. Schumacher who penned the classic discourse, Small is Beautiful, a year later in 1973. As the world economy began to reel from oil price shocks, Schumacher’s eloquent and prophetic writings scorned the materialist assumption that ‘growth is good’ and ‘bigger is better’, and instead argued that natural resources like fossil fuels should not be treated as expendable ‘income’ but rather as capital owing to their non-renewability and eventual depletion.

Often called the ‘philosophy of enoughness,’ Schumacher was one of the first economists to question if Gross National Product could sufficiently measure human well-being, concluding with the damning verdict that “modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place.” [13] Upon his advice that governments must respect natures “tolerance margins” and first prioritise sustainable development, the only answer to solving “the problem of production”, he said, is to first “thoroughly understand the problem and begin to see the possibility of evolving a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for permanence.” [14]

These questions of ‘green’ or ‘ecological economics’ may not be anything new, as furthered by other important studies contradicting the blind reliance on economic growth such as For the Common Good (1989) by Daly and Cobb, but the sheer simplicity and common sense of the sustainability conundrum demands constant repetition. The established economic system steadfastly refuses to acknowledge planetary limits, flatly ignores the inevitability of an eventual end to the growth cycle, and fails to recognise that a system based on the amoral concerns of resource allocation has created a world of such unimaginable inequalities that millions of people over-consume to the point of obesity, whilst millions of others are left to die without access to adequate food.

Market Contradictions

Government leaders, far from contemplating the prognostic warnings of Limits to Growth, have charged in the opposite direction by unleashing a “veritable crusade of economic expansionism” with the prevailing neo-liberal policies followed since the 1980s. [15] The result is a contradiction at the heart of the market economy that literally threatens human life; by maximising trade for its own sake, without questioning the greenhouse-gas emissions brought about by the phenomenal rise in transport that free trade demands, we are placed on a collision course with the limits of social and environmental tolerance.

As set out in a report by the New Economics Foundation during the early years of the Kyoto Protocol, the simple logic of growth and trade liberalisation conflicts with attempts to control climate change. [16] At a time when leading scientists estimated that a 90 percent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions is required from the rich nations by 2030, international trade was forecasted to grow exponentially by 70 percent during the period of the Kyoto Protocol until 2012, yet the agreement failed to include any emissions from freight in its ‘right to pollute’ measures of cap-and-trade. [17] According to recent studies, CO2 emissions from shipping — which are twice as much as airlines and not even covered by the Kyoto accord — are not only far higher than previously thought, but could rise by as much as 75 percent in the next 15 to 20 years if world trade continues to grow and no action is taken. [18]

This ‘blind spot’ about freight, argued the NEF report, has led to a double failure; firstly in appreciating the real environmental impacts of rising freight movements, and secondly in the failure to remotely introduce the necessary policies to shift freight onto a sustainable path.[19] When the World Bank published a report in 2000 called The Quality of Growth, nowhere did they explain how ‘clean growth’ could be achieved globally while simultaneously reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by the drastic amount recommended by the IPCC. It constitutes an underlying conflict of interest that has yet to be debated at the highest levels of government, let alone resolved; do we prioritise the relentless opening of a country’s borders to international competition and the unrestrained movement of goods and services, or do we cooperatively manage the global economy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions?

“Ships Passing in the Night”

According to the logic of neoliberal economics, it is perfectly acceptable for thousands of lorries and ships to be ‘passing in the night,’ carrying almost identical goods or with produce that could be produced locally, without consideration of the environmental impact of needlessly burning fuel. The UK, to give a small example, exports one-and-a-half thousand tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany each year, and imports practically the same amount from the same country [20], a practice of ecologically wasteful trade that is not only repeated with every material product made, but is endlessly encouraged by the values of a purely capitalistic financial system.

Similar pernicious examples could be repeated ad infinitum, as in recent studies that show how deforestation — which added 5,000 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere between 1989 and 1995 without even mentioning the profoundly deleterious effect on essential oxygen production from trees — is perversely encouraged by the values of economic globalisation and now threatens to annihilate some 60 percent of all species. [21] As succinctly concluded by the NEF; “To build the global economy on the foundations of fuel-intensive international trade and consumption is to build a castle on shifting and treacherous sand.” [22]

The predominant market-based approaches to tackling climate change, not least the carbon cap-and-trade schemes endorsed by the Kyoto Protocol, are equally a part of the central problem owing to their implicit approval of unlimited economic expansion. As argued extensively by alternative and green economists, it is markets that “got us into this crisis in the first place” [23] and now it is markets, somewhat sardonically, that are touted as the only solution, as reflected in the conclusion of the Stern Review that climate change is the “greatest market failure the world has seen.”

Free market proposals like carbon-trading, advocated by a growing list of prominent economists, high-profile politicians and ‘green NGOs’ (including Sir Nicholas Stern, World Bank chief economist Larry Summers, Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Richardson, Eliot Spitzer, and not least Bill Clinton and Al Gore who both quipped that “the invisible hand has a green thumb”) [24] are not only deficient measures that give the illusion that suitable action is being taken, but are also prolonging the environmental crisis by creating new market opportunities for corporate profits and by delaying investment into renewable energies.

Commodification and Overconsumption

“The act of commodification at the heart of offset schemes assigns a financial value to the impetus that someone may feel to take climate action,” reports the Carbon Trade Watch, “and neatly transforms this potential to bring about change into another market transaction. There is then no urgent need for people to question the underlying assumptions about the nature of the social and economic structures that brought about climate change in the first place.” [25] By turning nature into a ‘market’, in other words, attention is temporarily diverted from the reality that “today’s ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of its existence.” [26]

The clearly sane response to the emergency of global warming is for all developed nations to considerably reduce their levels of consumption, but this platitude will remain a fantasy until the inherent inequities of the world economy are first addressed. Only then, coupled with an international acceptance of the need to drastically limit the quantity of fossil fuels being extracted and burnt from the earth, can a workable framework for climate change mitigation be meaningfully discussed.

The evidence so far, judged in the context of a continuing “great global coal rush”, is that such an admittance is still critically ignored; China, who remains reluctant to cut any CO2 emissions if it means sacrificing economic growth, has doubled its annual coal production in six years; India will construct more than 100 coal-fired plants over the next decade; US power corporations are frantically pushing ahead with plans to construct around 150 new coal-fired stations; and the UK Labour government is quietly resurrecting two deep coal mines in Wales with furtive plans to reopen several more. [27] “Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination,” says the eco-activist George Monbiot, “we drift into catastrophe.” [28]

It is possible to feel an acute sense of foreboding when comparing the basic threats of global warming with government inertia and denial, but climate change as the “moral question of the 21st century” also holds the potential to initiate global justice on a scale never seen throughout history. [29] This is best illustrated through a key concept promoted by many environmental campaigners as a guide for agreeing a solution to CO2 emissions: carbon debt. If the wealthiest countries first acknowledge that their unequal use of the global commons has run up an enormous and unpaid ecological ‘debt’ to the world, runs the argument, then the stage is set for a new kind of dialogue between rich and poor countries. Any future negotiations on emissions reductions or the sharing of reductions, therefore, must also focus on just recompense for the damage already done to the atmosphere.

Carbon Debt

A plethora of reports and articles constantly reveal how developing countries, who have done comparatively little to contribute to global warming, have become the world’s ‘climate change canaries’ and will pay the highest price in years to come through increasing droughts, storms and vector diseases, therefore requiring a moral ‘pay back’ of the carbon debt accrued by industrialised nations. The impoverished living standards of the billions of people living on less than two-dollars-a-day, in this respect, is the immoral safeguard preventing the planet from even worse disaster. It would not be alarmist to conjecture that if everyone shared the same lifestyle as the average American, the “holocaust predicted for the distant future would have already visited us.” [30]

A consensus of environmentalists now propose that the only acceptable solution to redressing CO2 emissions must be equity-based, thereby conceding “each individual’s logical claim to the atmosphere”. [31] The proposed mechanism of ‘contraction and convergence,’ as formulated by the Global Commons Institute, incorporates these principles by first establishing how much carbon dioxide can be produced each year within a safe limit, then basically dividing that sum between each individual in the world. On a set date, all nations would ‘converge’ to an agreed level of emissions.

This straightforward concept, which is already approved by the European Parliament and key government spokesman in Africa, India and China, embodies more than just equal rights to the atmosphere for every citizen. The implementation of contraction and convergence, based upon an international acceptance of ecological limits, would necessitate a sustainable world economy, an enforced reduction in consumption levels by the wealthiest nations, and hence a vast redistribution of resource usage between nations.

If contraction and convergence can be imagined as a potential model for future world development as a whole, it could also lead to a greater emphasis on sharing through a reformed economic system that prioritises sustainability and basic human needs. The large-scale implications for global justice would be immense and all-encompassing, reflected in a necessary reorientation of the values and driving forces behind the economy. Rather than the blind pursuit of maximum instant gratification and profit, the underlying priorities governing social development would need to focus on the collective desire for human survival, an end to poverty and gross inequality between countries, and the beginning of an international culture defined by cooperation and the shared purpose of averting mass catastrophe.

Man’s Ingenuity

In the present political climate such a vision might seem like abstract idealism, but if the alarming forecasts of the IPCC come anywhere near to fruition with the exposure of hundreds of millions to drought, hunger and flooding, then “the biggest economic and geo-political realignment of recent history” will soon be unavoidable. [32] Two optimistic examples can be cited of how capable man is at change and adaption, firstly in a study of the Second World War economy in which England radically simplified its lifestyles and reduced its consumption of resources [33], and in which America turned around its economy “on a dime” upon entering the war in 1941. [34]

Another example of man’s ingenuity and responsiveness to potential calamity is seen in the cyclical response by governments to financial emergencies, as witnessed recently with the respective bailouts enacted by the Fed and the Bank of England. [35] What is clearly missing when these examples are applied to the environmental emergency is the same sense of a shared crisis, the necessary statesmanship and vision distinct from the short-term concerns for economic hegemony and profit, and the combined leadership of governments who recognise the critical need to reverse the escalating “problem of production.”

More than three decades after E. F. Schumacher penned his famous treatise, the global obsession with economic growth has stretched the limits of natural resources to the point of imminent exhaustion, an empirical conclusion that requires no further study or mathematical modelling to confirm. The neglected policy debate on ecological limits, increasingly obfuscated by the complex arguments over CO2 emissions, is unable to call out the elephant of unsustainable lifestyles without challenging the very premise of an economic system built upon endless consumption and competition over scarce resources. The only enduring cause for hope, despite the continued antipathy of the international community in questioning the systemic causes of global warming, is for climate change to become the world’s greatest equaliser by forcing an admission of the failure of globalised market forces.

NOTES

1. William J. Kole. “Climate-proofing economic growth” (Associated Press, 28th August 2007).

2. Jeremy Lovell. “Global warming impact like ‘nuclear war’” (Reuters, 12th September 2007).

3. Ian Sample. “Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land” (The Guardian, 31st August 2007).

4. Agence France Presse. “World hit by record extreme weather events in 2007: WMO” (August 7th 2007).

5. Matthew Green, Fiona Harvey and Barney Jopson. “Global warming concerns after Africa deluge” (Financial Times, London, 19th September 2007).

6. David Adam. “Loss of arctic ice leaves experts stunned” (The Guardian, London, 4th September 2007).

7. Cahal Milmo. “‘Too late to avoid global warming,’ say scientists” (The Independent, London, 19th September 2007).

8. John Ward. “U.N. climate talks end in cloud of discord” (Washington Post, September 1st 2007).

9. Agence France-Presse. “Climate change: row mars Vienna talks on future emissions cuts” (August 31st 2007).

10. Worldwatch Institute. “Window to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change Closing; EU Should Press for Immediate U.S. Action” (September 13th 2007).

11. Wouter Van Dieren. Taking nature into account: A report to the Club of Rome — Introduction (Springer-Verlag New York Inc., June 1995) p. 3.

12. Ibid.

13. E. F. Schumacher. Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered (Blond & Briggs, Great Britain, 1973) p. 246.

14. Ibid. p. 16.

15. Quote from Wouter Van Dieren, ibid.

16. Andrew Simms. “Collision course: free trade’s free ride on the global climate” (New Economics Foundation, November 2000)

17. Ibid, p. 2.

18. John Vidal. “CO2 output from shipping twice as much as airlines” (The Guardian, March 3rd 2007).

19. Ibid, p. 9.

20. Andrew Simms, Dan Moran and Peter Chowla. “The UK Interdependence Report: How the world sustains the nation’s lifestyles and the price it pays” (New Economics Foundation, April 2006).

21. Julio Godoy. ‘Incentives Offered to Destroy Forests’ (Inter Press Service, September 20th 2007)

22. Andrew Simms. “Collision course: free trade’s free ride on the global climate” (New Economics Foundation, November 2000) p. 5.

23. See, for example, John Cavanagh, John Feffer, Daphne Wysham. Just Climate Policy (Foreign Policy in Focus, June 28th 2007).

24. See Mitchel Cohen. “Listen Gore: Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis” (CounterPunch.org, February 2nd 2007).

25. Kevin Smith. “The Carbon Neutral Myth: Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins” (Transnational Institute report, February 20th 2007).

26. John Bellamy Foster. “A New War on the Planet?” (MRZine, June 8th 2007)

27. John Harris. “The great global coal rush puts us on the fast track to irreversible disaster” (The Guardian, London, August 30th 2007).

28. George Monbiot. “A sudden change of state” (The Guardian, July 3rd 2007)

29. Quote from George Monbiot. “Drastic action on climate change is needed now – and here’s the plan” (The Guardian, 31st October 2006).

30. C.E. Karunakaran. Dangerous Denial (Frontline Magazine, February 2007, Vol:24 Iss:04)

31. Andrew Simms. An environmental war economy: The lessons of ecological debt and global warming (New Economics Foundation, July 2001) p. 2.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid, p. 26-33

34. See George Monbiot interview by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. “If We Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of Millions of People to Death” (Democracy Now! Interview, May 18th 2007).

35. See Andrew Dobson. A climate of crisis: Towards the eco-state (OpenDemocracy.org, September 19th 2007).