Growing Climate Justice

Food First Backgrounder, Winter 2009, Vol. 15, No. 4

“Climate Justice means stripping transnational corporations of the tremendous power they hold over our lives, and in its place building democracy at the local, national and international levels.” – CorpWatch

Climate change compels us for our very survival to create a more just and equitable food system. As world leaders gather in Copenhagen for the 15th conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, leaders can’t agree on how to address the climate crisis. Agriculture has been all but ignored, and no specific solutions to the impending climate crisis in our food systems have been floated outside of the biotech industry’s public relations departments. With time running out on an agreement, a new international voice is emerging, one that demands climate justice. Led by countries in the global South, small island nations, people of color, and other marginalized communities in the industrial North, the movement for climate justice demands solutions which are democratically controlled, socially just and framed within a context of human rights. This movement has much in common with the movement for food sovereignty and, in fact, food sovereignty and climate justice go hand in hand.

The Problem

Climate change poses enormous threats to food production. A one to two centigrade increase in average global temperatures will likely cause crop yields to fall in many underdeveloped areas of the global South. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), large areas of Africa could be stricken by yield decreases of over 50% by the year 2020 as a result of an increasingly hotter and drier climate.ii Small mountain glaciers will disappear, threatening water supplies, and there will be extensive damage to local fisheries and coral reefs. Scientists predict that at least some of these changes will occur even if the world can rapidly reduce emissions. Agriculture is also one of the primary contributors to climate change, so any solution tailored to agriculture will have to help our food systems adapt to a changing climate while massively reducing its contribution to the problem.

As world leaders continue to debate the official solutions, farmers, women, and the movement for climate justice worldwide are forging their own solutions on the ground.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture accounts for 13.5% of greenhouse gas emissions—as much as the entire global transportation sector.iii These measured emissions are largely the results of synthetic fertilizer use, which releases nitrous oxide, a gas with 296 times the warming power of CO2,iv methane from large scale animal operations, and methane release from rice paddies. The IPCC number however does not include the indirect emissions from agriculture, including deforestation, transport, fertilizer synthesis, on-farm energy use and food processing. Deforestation alone is responsible for 18% of total global carbon emissions,v and is the number one source of emissions in large agriculture export economies like Brazil and Indonesia. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change pegged agriculture as the largest driver of deforestation.vi Destruction of the Amazon is directly linked to the price of soy—suggesting the march of soy into agricultural frontier drives Amazon deforestation.vii Indonesia has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, and is now the world’s third largest producer of greenhouse gases. By 2020 Indonesia’s palm oil plantations—thanks in part to the industrial North’s demand for biodiesel—will triple in size, resulting in a 98% loss of forest cover.

The rural poor are often blamed for deforestation, but regressive land policies and years of land concentration have made millions landless and facilitated the march of the poor into virgin and marginal lands. Furthermore, in places like Guatemala and Indonesia, pressure from increasingly extractive international agribusiness, and not small farmers, is driving land conversions.ix While agriculture may not be responsible for all the world’s deforestation, if even half can be indirectly ascribed to agriculture, then the global food system is responsible for fully a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s peasant farmers contributed little to this destruction, and yet they may have the most to lose.

• BK15_4 Winter 2009 Climate Justice