Food, Finance & Climate

Triple Crisis, A Three-Fold Opportunity

by Vandana Shiva,

November 22, 2008

At the end of 2007, Al Gore and IPCC were honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize for waking up the world to the climate catastrophe we face as a consequence of fossil fuel based industrial production and consumerism.

By early 2008, the food crisis had emerged as an emergency.

Industrialized agriculture and globalized food systems have been put forth as sources of cheap and abundant food.  However, food is no longer cheap.  The era of cheap food and cheap oil is over.  The food crisis, mainly triggered by rising prices that emerged in 2007 and 2008 has led to food riots in many countries. Read more »

This Is What Denial Does

The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch.  But they have the same cause...

This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

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Save the Planet from Capitalism

A Letter from President Evo Morales about Climate Change and the International crisis

Sisters and brothers:

Today, our Mother Earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather: the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps; the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas, where approximately 60% of the world population live; the increase in the processes of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources; a higher frequency in natural disasters that the communities of the earth suffer[1]; the extinction of animal and vegetal species; and the spread of diseases in areas that before were free from those diseases.

One of the most tragic consequences of the climate change is that some nations and territories are the condemned to disappear by the increase of the sea level.

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Tap dreams: Who controls what we drink?

Corporate water comes to (and from) San Francisco
BY Amanda Witherell
reposted from the SF Bay Guardian
Wednesday December 10, 2008

On Dec. 2 two water conferences were held in San Francisco, attended by very different groups of people.

Downtown, in a room deep within the Hyatt Regency hotel, executives from PepsiCo, Dean Foods, GE, ConAgra, and other major companies gathered for the Corporate Water Footprinting Conference. The agenda that the conference made public included a presentation by Nestlé on assessing water-related risks in communities, Coca-Cola's aggressive environmental water-neutrality goal, and MillerCoors plan to use less water to make more beer.

But what these giant corporations, which are seeking to control more and more of the world's water, really discussed the public will never know. Read more »