Climate Change Commerce

Farming leaders, gathered from around the world in Bali to discuss solutions proposed by delegates at the current climate change conference, have rejected the resolutions emerging from formal negotiations and presented their own answers to global warming.

The international peasant movement, La Via Campesina sited industrialized agriculture as a major contributor to global climate change and stated that the solution can be found in promoting food sovereignty by developing small-scale sustainable agriculture.

La Via Campesina’s International coordinator, Henry Saragih, said “the answer is in food sovereignty based on family agriculture. We should oppose the free market system and oppose the privatization of agriculture.” Beyond small-scale sustainable agriculture, the group also proposed local energy sovereignty, reducing the distance between work places and homes and radically changing current production and consumption patterns.

La Via Campesina argue that solutions being negotiated during the Bali talks, such as the alternative use of plant-derived fuels and carbon trading, do not in fact address the real problems of climate change but rather open up new international business ventures.

“Promoting agrofuel or biofuel as they call it, is not the answer as it only causes a world dependent on food to use food as fuel. In Indonesia alone we see how palm oil for cooking oil is being exported for agro-fuel and in Brazil, corn is being used for ethanol,” Saragih said.

Joao Palate from Mozambique said that the governments present at the conference are not serious in tackling climate change as, “they are here to do business. They are here to think of how they can benefit or make money out of climate change.”

“We are the one who are most affected by climate change. However, in this conference, the voice of the most affected are not being heard,” Palate said.
Palate argues that farmers, especially in rural communities in developing countries, are among the first to suffer from climate change as changes in weather patterns brings unusual droughts, floods and storms destroying crops, farmlands, and farm-stock.

Source: Jakarata Post