Tag Archives: biofuels

Latest Developments, October 31

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In the latest news and analysis…

New nuclear age
The Guardian reports on a new study suggesting countries that already possess nuclear arms are planning to spend large sums of money to upgrade their capabilities over the coming years.
“Despite government budget pressures and international rhetoric about disarmament, evidence points to a new and dangerous ‘era of nuclear weapons’, the report for the British American Security Information Council (Basic) warns. It says the US will spend $700bn (£434bn) on the nuclear weapons industry over the next decade, while Russia will spend at least $70bn on delivery systems alone. Other countries including China, India, Israel, France and Pakistan are expected to devote formidable sums on tactical and strategic missile systems.
For several countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Israel and France, nuclear weapons are being assigned roles that go well beyond deterrence, says the report. In Russia and Pakistan, it warns, nuclear weapons are assigned ‘war-fighting roles in military planning’.”

Dictator savings
Global Witness has welcomed a resolution adopted at last week’s UN anti-corruption conference that calls for national governments to enforce laws that forbid banks to accept money looted from the coffers of other states.
“Corruption on the scale that causes revolutions cannot happen without a bank to take the money. The very fact that some states are trying to get stolen money returned makes it clear that something has gone very wrong; these funds, which belong to the people of Egypt and Tunisia, should not be in foreign bank accounts in the first place,” said Global Witness’s George Boden.

Seal of approval
A new report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations detailing labour rights violations on tea plantations owned by British-Dutch company Unilever raises “doubts regarding the reliability of Rainforest Alliance certification.”
“Civil society organisations have been urging tea companies for many years to address the precarious working conditions of millions of tea workers worldwide. In response, there is a clear trend of multinational tea packers indeed stepping up their efforts to address sustainability issues in this sector. To this end tea companies are increasingly making use of independent and more rigorous multi-stakeholder sustainability standard systems, such as Rainforest Alliance (RA), Utz Certified and Fairtrade, which are generally seen as best industry practice. As a consequence the share of world tea exports certified by global standard systems grew by 2000% in the period from 2004 to 2009 alone. It is estimated that roughly 15% of tea exported worldwide will have been certified in 2011. Now several years later this study is assessing whether there is evidence of improvement of the working conditions on tea estates that have achieved RA certification, the most important sustainability certification in the tea sector in terms of volume.”

Biopiracy
Al Jazeera reports on allegations that a subsidiary of US biotech giant Monsanto genetically modified Indian eggplant seeds without obtaining prior authorization.
“In response, the national biodiversity authority has announced its plans to prosecute Monsanto for carrying out this research without seeking its permission and the consent of hundreds of thousands of farmers who have cultivated these varieties for generations. Officials at the authority say that, by failing to consult with farmers and the national biodiversity authority, the multinational firm has run foul of India’s Biological Diversity Act 2002. The law states that, if companies want to genetically modify indigenous varieties of seeds and plants – for research or commercialisation purposes – they must obtain prior consent of the authority. That never happened, the national biodiversity authority says, so now Monsanto and Mahyco look set to face charges of biopiracy – a fancy word for theft. It will be the first criminal prosecution under the act if it goes ahead. Though brinjal is a vegetable that is now widely eaten and grown around the world, it is native to south Asia with more than 2,500 varieties.”

Colonization through investment
The Observer reports on the fallout of a biofuel bust in Tanzania, where a village leader speaks of “colonialism in the form of investment.”
“A quarter of the village’s land in Kisarawe district was acquired by a British biofuels company in 2008, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company has gone bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well. The same story is playing out across Africa, as foreign investors buy up land but leave some of the poorest people on Earth worse off when their plans fail.”

The right to food
A UN food expert is urging world leaders to put the right to food ahead of commercial interests at this week’s G-20 summit.
“The G-20 made an important statement of intent by placing food security at the top of its agenda. But agreeing on a food security action plan without addressing biofuels and speculation would be like running a bath without putting in the plug. All of the good ideas simply drain away,” according to UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter.

Development 3.0
The World Bank’s Justin Yifu Lin argues for a third way in development thinking – in the wake of “structuralist, state-led” policies on the one hand, and “largely neo-liberal” ones on the other – and addresses critiques from three eminent economists.
“The credibility argument [that policies were not reversible] was used to support the shock therapy in the East European and Formal Soviet Union’s transition in the early 1990s. However, to ward off large unemployment and subsequent social/political instability, governments in transition economies were very often forced to provide other disguised and less efficient forms of subsidies and protection to firms in the old priority sectors even though those firms were privatized. As a result most transition economies encountered the awkward situation of ‘shock without therapy’.”

Business and human rights
In an interview with Business Ethics Magazine, John Ruggie talks about the voluntary guiding principles he formulated over his six years as UN special representative for business and human rights and the inevitable evolution towards legal accountability.
“Finally, judicial remedy will continue to evolve. Judicial reform in countries where the rule of law is weak and governments are corrupt is a slow process, but it is happening. And the web of legal liability for corporate involvement in egregious violations is expanding in the home countries of multinational corporations—a trajectory that will continue no matter how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the applicability of the Alien Tort Statute to legal persons, such as corporations.”

Latest Developments, August 25

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In today’s latest news and analysis…

Amnesty International says Libya’s Transitional National Council, which has now been recognized by the Arab League and is relocating to the capital Tripoli, is legally obligated to hand Moammar Gadhafi over to the International Criminal Court if and when he is captured. But Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations says the principle of “complementarity” means the ICC “can claim jurisdiction on one of only two conditions: when the country lacks a functioning judicial system, or when state authorities have manifestly failed to carry out a credible investigation into alleged atrocity crimes.” He argues, however, “if there were ever a strong case for ICC jurisdiction, it is Libya–a country with no functioning judicial system after four decades of arbitrary, dictatorial rule.” But as ICC lawyers wrapped up their first ever war crimes trial, the Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Baldauf asks if the fledgling Court is capable of trying Gadhafi, given its short but shaky history. And South Africa’s deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, wants the ICC to investigate possible human rights violations by NATO. He also said the military alliance’s disregard for UN Security Council resolutions was having a ripple effect in the region: “Because of this situation created in Libya, the Security Council has not been able to agree on how to intervene in Syria.”

While not going as far in its criticism of NATO, a Globe and Mail editorial argues the “improvised air” of Operation Unified Protector “is not a good precedent for future applications of the United Nations’ responsibility-to-protect doctrine – which they interpreted very broadly.” But author David Rieff thinks what you see is what you get: “R2P may not have been designed as the latest version of humanitarian intervention, but with the Libyan action, that is what it has become.” In fact, as with the “humanitarian intervention” in Somalia during the 1990s, he believes the mission creep in Libya was entirely predictable: “This militarization may not be what [Gareth] Evans and the other architects of R2P intended. But then it is rare that a doctrine with the power to command people’s hearts and minds ever survives in the pure form those who first promulgated it imagined.”

The African Union no doubt felt the absence of its largest financial backer, Moammar Gadhafi, – though he was in good company as only four heads of state showed up – at a special summit to raise emergency relief funds for the Horn of Africa’s food crisis. Although pledges reached $351 million, the African Development Bank’s medium-term loans and grants represented the lion’s share of that amount. The actual cash total for immediate assistance appears to be $46 million. As a result, there was no shortage of criticism, especially for continental giants Nigeria and South Africa whose governments promised a combined $3.3 million in new money. “If we truly believe in ‘African solutions for African problems‘, we need to demonstrate this very clearly, not just in words but in actions,” according to Africans Act 4 Africa. On the other hand, EU humanitarian aid commissioner Kristalina Georgieva offered a more positive spin: “This is the first such summit held by a young organization with little humanitarian experience and a small but dedicated team. It will improve in the future.”

The wider community is not doing much better, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. So far governments have provided or promised only about a third of the $161 million it needs for its plan “to restore livelihoods and build the resilience of populations in the face of climate and other shocks” in East Africa.

A new study suggests a link between climate and violence, as the 93 tropical countries examined were twice as likely to experience internal conflict in El Niño years as they were in La Niña years. Lead researcher Solomon Hsiang of Columbia University “thinks the Niño analysis shows an example of a clear link between climate and conflict, and that this puts a new onus of proof on anyone saying that no such link will be at work as the climate changes in the future, even if it does not show what that future link might be,” according to the Economist.

Alena Buyx of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics lays out five principles for ethical biofuels, according to which their production must not violate people’s “essential rights” relating to food, water, health, etc.; they must be environmentally sustainable; they must reduce greenhouse gas emissions; their exchange must accord with fair trade practices; their costs and benefits must be shared equitably. To which she adds a sixth principle: “If the first five principles are respected and if biofuels can play a crucial role in mitigating dangerous climate change then, depending on certain key considerations, there is a duty to develop such biofuels.”

Swedish clothing company H&M says it is investigating after nearly 300 people collapsed at a supplier’s factory in Cambodia over a period of three days. According to a Reuters report, “deputy provincial police chief Ly Virak blamed the mass faintings on the “weak” health of workers and said the factory suspended operations until next week to allow its 4,000 workers to rest.” About 300 workers also fell ill last month at another H&M-affiliated factory in the capital Phnom Penh. The garment industry is Cambodia’s biggest source of foreign currency but has experienced sometimes violent strikes in recent years as workers demand better pay and working conditions. The latest “faintings” began on the same day as Greenpeace released a new report entitled “Dirty Laundry II: Hung Out to Dry” in which  the NGO says it found “hormone-disrupting chemicals” in the clothing of 14 global brands, including H&M. Helena Helmersson, the company’s head of corporate social responsibility, countered that the amounts found were well below EU restricted levels and that, in any case, the chemicals in question are not dangerous for humans. The first “Dirty Laundry” report came out last month and linked H&M, among others, “to suppliers in China who were found to be releasing a cocktail of chemicals into the Pearl and Yangtze River deltas.”

Oxfam’s Duncan Green looks at a report on the impact of cash transfers which, he says, are “all the rage, especially those handed over directly to women, who are widely thought to use the money more responsibly (spending it on food, rather than booze and fags etc).” While the Oxfam/Concern study identified a number of positives resulting from cash transfers, it also raised some serious concerns. Some of these related to poor project planning and execution, but others appear to run deeper: “Where cash was given in response to a food crisis, it is clear that while food aid was shared, cash was not. This was a major concern among recipients. Community sharing is critically important to women who tend to have a range of lending and borrowing strategies, with neighbours, family, shops and so forth, that enable them to cope when things get tough. Harming these coping strategies is potentially counter-productive for women who may find themselves increasingly vulnerable and less resilient to food insecurity in the long term.”

Latest Developments, August 2

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In the latest news and analysis…

American senators Carl Levin and Chuck Grassley have brought forth legislation that aims to greatly reduce international financial secrecy and wrongdoing by requiring anyone setting up a company in the US to divulge the name of the beneficial owner. “Until this law is passed, foreign corrupt politicians, terrorists and drug traffickers can continue legally to hide their identities and their dubious assets behind the secrecy provided by American companies,” according to Global Witness’s Stefanie Ostfeld who hailed the bill’s introduction. As did Global Financial Integrity’s Heather Lowe who said, as things stand, it is “far too easy to gain access to financial services in the U.S. through anonymous U.S. corporations, while it is far too difficult for law enforcement groups to figure out who is really behind those corporations.

Plaintiffs in Papua New Guinea have obtained a temporary injunction “preventing a mine from dumping millions of tonnes of waste into the sea.” The news came less than a week after a national court judge had ruled the Chinese-Australian copper project’s proposed method of waste disposal “amounts to an abuse and depletion of Papua New Guinea’s natural resources and environment” but refused to impose a permanent ban. PNG’s Supreme Court will examine the case later this month.

A new Food and Agriculture Organization report suggests that, contrary to popular belief, growing demand for grain in China and India has little to do with increasing food prices.  In fact, the FAO says cereal imports to the two Asian giants actually declined between 2000 and 2007 and points to the rise of biofuels as the main driver of growth in demand. And a new report by the New Economics Foundation suggests EU fisherman have discarded more than 2 million tonnes of cod over the last half-century.

Somalia’s Islamist Al Shabab “has destroyed whatever legitimacy it had, by obstructing humanitarian organizations from entering the country to provide relief from the severe famine,” according to a Globe and Mail editorial. Meanwhile, the US has decided to ease up on some obstruction of its own by loosening restrictions on aid to Somalia that threatened to prosecute any organization deemed to have provided any financial or material support to Al Shabab. Food aid aside, the rebel group which controls much of Somalia, including the famine-stricken south, has reportedly gotten its hands on a large number of American-made weapons.

Arguing “we live in an era when political boundaries, not the lives of nomadic pastoralists, are sacrosanct,” Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs takes on the role of arbitrary colonial-era borders in the Horn of Africa’s food crisis. He points to the fact that many Somali people live in Kenya and Ethiopia as a prime reason for the ongoing instability of the border regions. Sachs also discusses “the overlap of dryland climates and conflict zones” and argues “the region urgently requires a development strategy, not a military approach.” Moreover, he says the “US and Europe are not only failing to respond to the African drought; they have probably contributed to it through their greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Former NATO secretary general Javier Solana and the University of the Basque Country’s Daniel Innerarity declare an end to foreign affairs, saying that globalized threats and opportunities give today’s world an “epidemic character” that renders national policies inadequate: “Truly effective global governance is the strategic horizon that humanity must pursue today with all its energy.” Failure, they claim will mean “the “end of history” – not as the placid apotheosis of liberal democracy’s global victory, but as the worst collective failure we can imagine.”

A Bloomberg editorial argues Brazil, India and South Africa “don’t seem to demonstrate the awareness that international leadership comes with responsibilities as well as privileges.” Exhibit A, according to the authors, is the three countries’ disappointing troop contribution to UN peacekeeping: only India is a “major contributor,” they say, and even it ranks behind its much smaller neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But according to June statistics on military and police contributions to UN peacekeeping, India  ranks third overall, behind only Pakistan and Bangladesh. Brazil and South Africa rank 13th and 14th, respectively. The UK is 46th and the US is 64th, with approximately a twentieth of Brazil’s or South Africa’s contributions. As for the editorialists’ notion that a greater contribution from India, Brazil and South Africa could “possibly free European troops for more difficult missions, such as Afghanistan,” there are currently only three European countries (Italy, France and Spain) ranked among the top 35 contributors with over 500 troops or police serving as blue helmets.

A Voice of America editorial celebrates the UN refugee convention’s 60th anniversary, saying the agreement remains essential today given the millions “who have been uprooted from their homes and forced to live in difficult and in many cases unacceptable conditions.” The US leads the way both in terms of permanently resettling refugees (71,400 in 2010) and creating them in the first place (4.7 million from Afghanistan and Iraq).

Reuters’s Rachelle Younglai and Ana da Costa point out the “overwhelming irony” that credit agencies, such as Standard & Poors and Moody’s, “are the same firms that many blame as prime instigators of the 2007-2008 credit crisis for freely giving out top ratings to ultimately worthless structured mortgage products” and yet, they now “sit in judgment of the countries that had to ruin their public balance sheets to prevent financial collapse by saving the banks shattered by those bad instruments once blessed by the agencies.”