Trade talks could wreck climate change measures, campaigners warn
Protests staged in London during attempt to promote Canadian tar sands as energy source
* Bibi van der Zee
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 January 2011 16.49 GMT
Trade talks between Europe and Canada could leave the door open to companies suing states for losses incurred by efforts to fight climate change, campaigners claimed today.
The warning, backed by an MEP and a law expert, came as 10 protesters unsuccessfully attempted to talk to the Canadian energy minister, Ron Liepert, this morning during a visit to London for a meeting with Lord Howell, the UK minister for the Commonwealth.
Liepert is visiting the UK and Belgium to promote tar sands in the Canadian province of Alberta as a "leading source of secure energy". The protesters tried unsuccessfully to gain access to the Canadian high commission on Grosvenor Square.
Concern is focused on the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (Ceta), a trade deal which Canada and the EU have been negotiating for the last two years and which they hope to finally sign in 2012. Campaigners say Ceta could affect governments' rights to regulate themselves and could also open the door for tar sands oil to be imported into Europe.
The agreement, which is in draft form, includes a clause allowing corporations to sue states for compensation if they feel their earnings have been unfairly compromised. Campaigners fear the agreement would give investors leverage against proposed changes to the EU fuel quality directive, which MEPs are reviewing to decide if it should discriminate against carbon-intensive fuel, such as tar sands oil.
"The proposed trade agreement between Canada and the EU will have a substantial impact on efforts to address the local, regional and global impacts of oil sands developments," was the conclusion drawn by lawyer Steven Shrybman, who studied the draft agreement on behalf of tar sands campaigners in Canada.
"If Ceta fails to significantly improve on the norms for such trade agreements, it will only add to the serious impediments that now exist under Nafta [North American Free Trade Agreement] and WTO [World Trade Organisation] agreements to establishing effective measures to combat climate change."
The clause, known as an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, is increasingly common in the proliferating bilateral trade agreements around the world that have followed the collapse of the WTO's Doha round. Examples include:
• Tobacco company Philip Morris forced Uruguay to back down on tobacco legislation last year.
• In 2008, Dow Chemicals took legal action against the Canadian state of Quebec after a ban on "cosmetic" lawn pesticides.
• In a landmark case last year, which some observers fear may have granted private companies unprecedented water rights, the Canadian government settled a case brought by paper giants AbitibiBowater for $130m.
A spokeswoman for the UK Tar Sands Network, which organised today's protest, said: "Liepert is using the fact that the EU and Canada are currently negotiating to argue that any attempts to discriminate against tar sands oil due to its high carbon intensity is an unfair trade barrier.
"Tar sands oil is significantly more carbon-intensive than conventional fuels. Boosting the tar sands industry will directly contribute to increasing climate change and Europe has every right to ban imports of tar sands on these grounds."
Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder said: "There is a real concern that, if the final agreement includes an investor-to-state dispute mechanism, it could be used by corporations to prevent government actions to limit the tar sands and possibly even to stop government policy limiting the enormous use of water by the corporations in the tar sands."
However, Professor Lorand Bartels at Cambridge University's law faculty, who has seen the draft agreement, points out that it does include environmental exceptions which mean the "Canadians and the EU would retain the right to regulate for public policy reasons".
He believes anxieties about the agreement may be overblown, but agrees there are grounds for wider concern over the rapidly multiplying number of investor-state disputes as 57% of these cases have happened in the last five years.
Monday 31 January 2011
Tuesday 25 January 2011
The food crisis deepens
Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale'
The existing food system fails half the people on the planet, and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns
Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale'
The existing food system fails half the people on the planet, and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns
* Damian Carrington and John Vidal
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 January 2011 15.57 GMT
A farmer waters his crops in Malawi The existing global food system is failing half the people on Earth, the report warns. Photograph: Martin Godwin
The world will not be able to feed itself without destroying the planet unless a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution takes place, a major government report has concluded.
The existing food system is failing half of the people on Earth, the report finds, with 1 billion going hungry, 1 billion lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet and another billion "substantially overconsuming", leading to obesity epidemics. Stresses on the food system are reflected in price spikes but the cost of food will rise sharply in coming decades, the report adds, which will increase the risk of conflict and migration.
"The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report. An expanding world population combined with the need to stop over-exploiting natural resources such as soil and water means there is a compelling case for urgent action, the report states. Food is responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
"We need to act now," said Caroline Spelman, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, whose department co-commissioned the report from the government's futures thinktank Foresight. "Farmers have to grow more food at less cost to the environment."
The report, conducted by 400 scientists from 34 countries, found that food security is inextricably linked with seemingly diverse issues from poverty and economic growth, to water and energy shortages, to climate change and biodiversity loss. "The world has not recognised that this linking is essential" to meeting the challenge of feeding 2 billion more people by 2050 but with less environmental impact, said the government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, who oversaw the report. "It is not just science and technology, trade and prices – it is much bigger than that."
No single solution exists, says the report, but it is critical to spread existing knowledge and technology to the developing world to boost yields by "sustainable intensification". Dramatically reducing food waste is also crucial. "Thirty per cent of all food produced is never consumed," said Charles Godfray, at the University of Oxford and another report author. Investing in better trucks, roads and infrastructure is vital to getting food to people before it rots. In rich countries, such as the UK, preventing food being unnecessarily thrown away could save a family £500-700 a year, said Godfray.
There is a place for organic agriculture, found the report, but it "should not be adopted as the main strategy to achieve sustainable and equitable global food security". Scenarios suggesting organic production can satisfy future global demand assume major changes in peoples' diets, which "may be unachievable," says the report.
The report stated that new technologies, such as genetically modified crops and cloned livestock, should not be excluded on ethical or moral grounds, but that investment is "essential in the light of the magnitude of the challenges."
Global food price spikes in 2007-8 and 2010 saw riots and export bans around the world, and the Foresight report predicts further increases as competition for land, water and energy intensifies. Modelling done for the report, which attempted to account for climate change and water requirements as well as economic factors, predicts a doubling in real terms for maize, which feeds 300 million in Africa, between 30-80% rise in the cost of rice and 40-60% rise in the cost of wheat.
"The last three to four years have seen alarming spikes in hunger," said Haddad. "The price rises in 2007-8 were actually quite modest in a historical context but it led to 100 million more people going hungry. Bigger prices rises could wipe out the development gains of the last 20 years and promote violent conflict and migration."
Spelman emphasised the role of free markets and of consumers: "We must open up markets by removing subsidies and stopping protectionism." She said the biggest step forward in tackling food security would be a successful end for the stalled Doha trade talks, which began in 2001, adding that reform of the EU's common agricultural policy should encourage climate and wildlife protection.
In the UK, farmers should produce "more food more sustainably" and she suggested that small price increases represented an economic opportunity for British farmers.
But the report was criticised by some environmental and agricultural experts. The Indian food analyst Devinder Sharma said the report was limited in vision and anti-poor. "The world already produces enough food for 11.5 billion people. Beddington and the government call for radical change but they really want to intensify existing policies. This is just a very clever camouflage for policies which have failed the poor around the world."
Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur for the right to food, said that hunger was a political question, not just a technical one. "Since the early 1990s, the food bills of many poor countries have been multiplied by five or six, the result not only of population growth, but also of a lack of investment in agriculture that feeds local communities. The focus on export-led agriculture makes these countries vulnerable to price shocks on international markets as well as to currency exchange volatility." He urged G20 countries to address food speculation by banks and financiers, stop the "land grab" of farmland in Africa and elsewhere by rich countries and help countries build food reserves and avoid spikes in food prices.
Tom MacMillan, director of the UK Food Ethics Council said governments should help the most vulnerable people. "Priority must be to give the people most vulnerable to climate change and food insecurity more control over the markets, policies and innovations that affect them. Tackling hunger … is more about power and poverty than about technology."
The Foresight report is significantly different in its conclusions to that of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report – approved by the UK government and 57 others in 2008. This found that small-scale, environmentally friendly and organic production methods, based on local knowledge and protected from globalised markets, were the way forward to avert hunger in the next 40 years and that GM food was not a solution.
See also:
Land grabs in Africa (podcast)
The existing food system fails half the people on the planet, and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns
Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale'
The existing food system fails half the people on the planet, and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns
* Damian Carrington and John Vidal
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 January 2011 15.57 GMT
A farmer waters his crops in Malawi The existing global food system is failing half the people on Earth, the report warns. Photograph: Martin Godwin
The world will not be able to feed itself without destroying the planet unless a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution takes place, a major government report has concluded.
The existing food system is failing half of the people on Earth, the report finds, with 1 billion going hungry, 1 billion lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet and another billion "substantially overconsuming", leading to obesity epidemics. Stresses on the food system are reflected in price spikes but the cost of food will rise sharply in coming decades, the report adds, which will increase the risk of conflict and migration.
"The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report. An expanding world population combined with the need to stop over-exploiting natural resources such as soil and water means there is a compelling case for urgent action, the report states. Food is responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
"We need to act now," said Caroline Spelman, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, whose department co-commissioned the report from the government's futures thinktank Foresight. "Farmers have to grow more food at less cost to the environment."
The report, conducted by 400 scientists from 34 countries, found that food security is inextricably linked with seemingly diverse issues from poverty and economic growth, to water and energy shortages, to climate change and biodiversity loss. "The world has not recognised that this linking is essential" to meeting the challenge of feeding 2 billion more people by 2050 but with less environmental impact, said the government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, who oversaw the report. "It is not just science and technology, trade and prices – it is much bigger than that."
No single solution exists, says the report, but it is critical to spread existing knowledge and technology to the developing world to boost yields by "sustainable intensification". Dramatically reducing food waste is also crucial. "Thirty per cent of all food produced is never consumed," said Charles Godfray, at the University of Oxford and another report author. Investing in better trucks, roads and infrastructure is vital to getting food to people before it rots. In rich countries, such as the UK, preventing food being unnecessarily thrown away could save a family £500-700 a year, said Godfray.
There is a place for organic agriculture, found the report, but it "should not be adopted as the main strategy to achieve sustainable and equitable global food security". Scenarios suggesting organic production can satisfy future global demand assume major changes in peoples' diets, which "may be unachievable," says the report.
The report stated that new technologies, such as genetically modified crops and cloned livestock, should not be excluded on ethical or moral grounds, but that investment is "essential in the light of the magnitude of the challenges."
Global food price spikes in 2007-8 and 2010 saw riots and export bans around the world, and the Foresight report predicts further increases as competition for land, water and energy intensifies. Modelling done for the report, which attempted to account for climate change and water requirements as well as economic factors, predicts a doubling in real terms for maize, which feeds 300 million in Africa, between 30-80% rise in the cost of rice and 40-60% rise in the cost of wheat.
"The last three to four years have seen alarming spikes in hunger," said Haddad. "The price rises in 2007-8 were actually quite modest in a historical context but it led to 100 million more people going hungry. Bigger prices rises could wipe out the development gains of the last 20 years and promote violent conflict and migration."
Spelman emphasised the role of free markets and of consumers: "We must open up markets by removing subsidies and stopping protectionism." She said the biggest step forward in tackling food security would be a successful end for the stalled Doha trade talks, which began in 2001, adding that reform of the EU's common agricultural policy should encourage climate and wildlife protection.
In the UK, farmers should produce "more food more sustainably" and she suggested that small price increases represented an economic opportunity for British farmers.
But the report was criticised by some environmental and agricultural experts. The Indian food analyst Devinder Sharma said the report was limited in vision and anti-poor. "The world already produces enough food for 11.5 billion people. Beddington and the government call for radical change but they really want to intensify existing policies. This is just a very clever camouflage for policies which have failed the poor around the world."
Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur for the right to food, said that hunger was a political question, not just a technical one. "Since the early 1990s, the food bills of many poor countries have been multiplied by five or six, the result not only of population growth, but also of a lack of investment in agriculture that feeds local communities. The focus on export-led agriculture makes these countries vulnerable to price shocks on international markets as well as to currency exchange volatility." He urged G20 countries to address food speculation by banks and financiers, stop the "land grab" of farmland in Africa and elsewhere by rich countries and help countries build food reserves and avoid spikes in food prices.
Tom MacMillan, director of the UK Food Ethics Council said governments should help the most vulnerable people. "Priority must be to give the people most vulnerable to climate change and food insecurity more control over the markets, policies and innovations that affect them. Tackling hunger … is more about power and poverty than about technology."
The Foresight report is significantly different in its conclusions to that of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report – approved by the UK government and 57 others in 2008. This found that small-scale, environmentally friendly and organic production methods, based on local knowledge and protected from globalised markets, were the way forward to avert hunger in the next 40 years and that GM food was not a solution.
See also:
Land grabs in Africa (podcast)
Monday 24 January 2011
Incoterms
A quick test_
http://lo-net2.de/group/Material/incoterms/quizIncoterms.htm
The Terms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterm
http://lo-net2.de/group/Material/incoterms/quizIncoterms.htm
The Terms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterm
Wednesday 19 January 2011
E-waste
Can I ditch my computer and be green?
Computers may be a prime example of planned obsolescence, but you can decrease the damage along the way…
o Lucy Siegle
o The Observer, Sunday 30 January 2011
There is a disheartening moment when your computer makes weird noises and enforces Moore's law – which decrees that the computing power bought for a certain amount of money doubles every 18 months – by signalling its own obsolescence.
When it gives up the ghost, don't let it become another piece of unloved e-waste. The UK is responsible for 15% of Europe's total. Around 900 containers of e-waste from Western Europe lands in Asia and Africa each week. Some 80% is dumped, often burned in pits, releasing pollutants ranging from mercury in flatscreens to toxic heavy metals in a PC's central processing unit or barium in the plastic casings.
Also think of the squandered energy and resources used in making it. As Julie Hill reminds us in The Secret Life of Stuff, computing is one of the top water-using industries. Turning the 3G off on your iPhone reduces its energy consumption by 43-60%. You can buy greener, too – epeat.net rates electronics. The latest Greenpeace report shows electronics companies making progress on phasing out toxic materials but not on increasing longevity. Hardly suprising given their mission is to sell more. But this should be our focus. While the advice used to be to buy a sleek laptop (less power hungry), now it's to invest in a modular PC built with replaceable, repairable components and a capacity to upgrade. Eco beauty isn't all about being sleek and wafer thin.
Email Lucy at lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/lucysiegle for all her articles in one place
Notes:
http://www.videojug.com/interview/electronic-waste-2
http://www.videojug.com/interview/responsibility-for-e-waste-2
WEEE directive
ROHS
Basel convention
Substances in electronic goods
Toxics
Lead (Pb)
Copper (Cu)
Cadmium (Cd)
Chromium VI
Mercury
Flame retardants - PBB, PBDE etc.
Environmental principles:
RRR - reduce, reuse, recycle
PPP - polluter pays principle
Independent analysis by NGO's
Compliance to standards
Compliance to regulations
Loopholes - ways to avoid compliance - exporting waste as 2nd-hand goods...
Alternatives to lead: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281311/
Carbon fooprint of electronic products: http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2011/winter/carbon-footprints-weber.shtml
Ranking tables of electronic goods producers: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/toxics/2010/version16/Ranking%20tables%20Oct%202010-All%20companies.pdf
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/
EU deal on e-waste: http://www.euractiv.com/en/sustainability/lawmakers-seal-deal-toxic-substances-electronic-goods-news-499989
How green are Apple: http://www.apple.com/environment/#footprint
The Basel Convention: http://www.basel.int/
BAN: ban.org
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/weee/index_en.htm
Certification for green products:
EPEAT: http://www.epeat.net/
Based on IEEE 1680
Report writing:
http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/CILL/reports.htm
Friday 14 January 2011
7 billion people
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/14/population-explosion-seven-billion
Time to stop.
Saturday 8 January 2011
Food prices rocket as Republicans play fiddle
Food prices are rocketing, which is already resulting in riots. Peter Sinclair flags this on his excellent blog here with links to Scientific American, which explains the reasons and suggests a link to climate change. A debate about this is also raging on the Climate Progress website.
I find it ironic that some of the best science and news reporting regarding global environmental isssues is eminating from the USA, which seems to be hell bent on making matters worse thanks to Republican interventions.
More on this important issue here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/13/rising-food-prices-global-rethink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/21/olivier-de-schutter-food-farming
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jan/23/food-speculation-banks-hunger-poverty
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/23/gm-foods-world-population-crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-aside
I find it ironic that some of the best science and news reporting regarding global environmental isssues is eminating from the USA, which seems to be hell bent on making matters worse thanks to Republican interventions.
More on this important issue here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/13/rising-food-prices-global-rethink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/21/olivier-de-schutter-food-farming
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jan/23/food-speculation-banks-hunger-poverty
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/23/gm-foods-world-population-crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-aside
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)