The Next Crash Will Be Ecological -- and Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts

Johann Hari
Columnist for the London Independent
Posted: November 25, 2010 09:57 PM

Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or molest a masseur, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn't read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn't do bailouts.

That's what Cancun should be about -- surveying the startling scientific evidence, and developing an urgent plan to change course. The Antarctic -- which locks of 90 percent of the world's ice -- has now seen eight of its ice shelves fully or partially collapse. The world's most distinguished climate scientists, after recordings like this, say we will face a three to six feet rise in sea level this century. That means the drowning of London, Bangkok, Venice, Cairo and Shanghai, and entire countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives.

And that's just one effect of the way we are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Perhaps the most startling news story of the year passed almost unnoticed. Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world's oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world's most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 percent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950. Professor Boris Worm, who co-authored the study, said in shock: "I've been trying to think of a biological change that's bigger than this and I can't think of one." That has been the result of less than one degree of warming. Now we are on course for at least three degrees this century. What will happen?

The scientific debate is not between deniers and those who can prove that releasing massive amounts of warming gases will make the world warmer. Every major scientific academy in the world, and all the peer-reviewed literature, says global warming denialism is a pseudo-science, on a par with Intelligent Design, homeopathy, or the claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. One email from one lousy scientist among tens of thousands doesn't dent that. No: the debate is between the scientists who say the damage we are doing is a disaster, and the scientists who say it is catastrophe.

Yet the world's governments are gathering in Cancun with no momentum and very little pressure from their own populations to stop the ecological vandalism. The Copenhagen conference last year collapsed after the most powerful people in the world turned up to flush their own scientists' advice down a very clean Danish toilet. These leaders are sometimes described as "doing nothing about global warming." No doubt that form of words will fill the reporting from Cancun too. But it's false. They're not "doing nothing" -- they are allowing their countries' emissions of climate-trashing gases to massively increase. That's not failure to act. It's deciding to act in an incredibly destructive way.

The collapse of Copenhagen has not shocked people into action; it has numbed them into passivity. Last year, we were talking -- in theory, at least -- about the legally binding cap on the world's carbon emissions, because the world's scientists say this is the only thing that can preserve the climate that has created and sustained human civilization. What are we talking about this year? What's on the table at Cancun, other than sand?

Almost nothing. They will talk about how to help the world's poor "adapt" to the fact we are drying out much of their land and drowning the rest. But everybody is backing off from one of the few concrete agreements at Copenhagen: to give the worst-affected countries $100 billion from 2020. Privately, they say this isn't the time -- they can come back for it, presumably, when they are on rafts. Oh, and they will talk about how to preserve the rainforests. But a Greenpeace report has just revealed that the last big deal to save the rainforests -- with Indonesia -- was a scam. The country is in fact planning to demolish most of its rainforest to plant commercial crops, and claim it had been "saved."

Karl Rove -- who was George W. Bush's chief spin-doctor -- boasted this year: "Climate is gone." He meant it is off the political agenda, but in time, this statement will be more true and more cursed than he realizes.

It's in this context that a new, deeply pessimistic framework for understanding the earth's ecology -- and our place in it -- has emerged. Many of us know, in outline, the warm, fuzzy Gaia hypothesis, first outlined by James Lovelock. It claims that the Planet Earth functions, in effect, as a single living organism called Gaia. It regulates its own temperature and chemistry to create a comfortable steady state that can sustain life. So coral reefs produced cloud-seeding chemicals which then protect them from ultraviolet radiation. Rainforests transpire water vapour so generate their own rainfall. This process expands outwards. Life protects life.

Now there is a radically different theory that is gaining adherents, ominously named the Medea hypothesis. The paleontologist Professor Peter Ward is an expert in the great extinctions that have happened in the earth's past, and he believes there is a common thread between them. With the exception of the meteor strike that happened 65 million years ago, every extinction was caused by living creatures becoming incredibly successful -- and then destroying their own habitats. So, for example, 2.3 billion years ago, plant life spread incredibly rapidly, and as it went it inhaled huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This then caused a rapid plunge in temperature that froze the planet and triggered a mass extinction.

Ward believes nature isn't a nurturing mother like Gaia. No: it is Medea, the figure from Greek mythology who murdered her own children. In this theory, life doesn't preserve itself. It serially destroys itself. It is a looping doomsday machine. This theory adds a postscript to Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. There is survival of the fittest, until the fittest trash their own habitat, and do not survive at all.

But the plants 2.3 billion years ago weren't smart enough to figure out what they were doing. We are. We can see that if we release enough warming gases we will trigger an irreversible change in the climate and make our own survival much harder. Ward argues that it is not inevitable we will destroy ourselves - because human beings are the first and only species that can consciously develop a Gaian approach. Just as Richard Dawkins famously said we are the first species to be able to rebel against our selfish genes and choose to be kind, we are the first species that can rebel against the Medean rhythm of life. We can choose to preserve the habitat on which we depend. We can choose life.

Yet at Cancun, the real question will be carefully ignored by delegates keen to preserve big business as usual. Long after our own little stories are forgotten, the choice we make now will still be visible -- in the composition of the atmosphere, the swelling of the seas, and the crack and creak of the great Antarctic ice. Do we want to be Gaia, or Medea?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent.

Government's role in a free-market economy

By Vijay K. Mathur

Saturday, November 20, 2010 - 11:18pm

Among many people, politicians and media pundits, there seems to be confusion about the operation of free markets. Sometimes the word capitalism is used to propagate the notion of free markets. However the word capitalism came into use almost one hundred years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 by Adam Smith, the most ardent supporter of free markets. Capitalism should not be confused with the system of free markets. Like markets, capitalism is evolutionary, however it encompasses not only economic organization but also political and social organization.

According to Adam Smith, self-interest (not selfishness), property rights and division of labor are three important interrelated pillars of economic growth. Property rights, if clearly defined and enforced, ensure that people are free to transact their goods and services at positive prices. Self-interest of sellers to make profits and of buyers to obtain products they prefer at the lowest prices brings sellers and buyers together in a market transaction. Self-interest in competitive markets maximizes economic welfare of the society. If free and competitive markets work, they efficiently allocate products among consumers according to their preferences, allocate inputs among producers, and enable producers to obtain the maximum output with given amounts of inputs. Division of labor facilitates scale economies to bring down costs.

However, there are circumstances when markets do not perform their function efficiently. Economists refer those states of the markets as market failure, a point missed by many who blindly promote virtues of free markets.

Market failure occurs due to many reasons. Let me discuss five of those reasons. First is monopoly power, where one or few producers and/or sellers gain control of the market. Monopolists restrict output and charge prices higher than the competitive market prices. That is the reason we have antitrust laws. The first major statute was The Sherman Act of 1890, enacted in response to the widespread growth of combinations or trusts in 1880s. Since the Sherman Act, other statutes have been enacted to deal with other anticompetitive behavior of businesses. Proper functioning of free competitive markets requires either to break-up monopolies, cease and desist monopolistic practices or regulate them. For example, in 1911 the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil Company into 33 geographically separate companies. Monopolies of electric and gas utilities are regulated to promote public interest.

The second reason for market failure is when producers do not fully bear total costs of products or are unable to capture all benefits of producing products. For example, oil and gas producers in Utah do not bear the full cost of health hazards their pollution imposes on population in the Uintah basin as well as in the Salt Lake valley. Many of the benefits of basic research and development and education pass on to others who do not pay the total price for inventions and knowledge production. Another example is when uninsured people seek health care in emergency clinics, thus causing higher premium costs to insured people. All such cases require government regulation or taxes or subsidies to improve efficiency of markets. A British economist A.C. Pigou, presented the earliest and most cogent discussion on market failure in 1920 in his book, The Economics of Welfare.

Third, market fails when there is a common property resource. Common property is nobody's property, hence the property is misused. For example, Great Lakes, Amazon Rainforest, Yellowstone National Park, national parks in Utah, Great Salt Lake are common property resources. Such resources cannot be privatized; the government has to intervene to preserve common property. The fourth reason is lack of information, misinformation or asymmetry of information. For example, the recent mortgage crisis was partly the result of asymmetry of information and/or misinformation to the participants, especially the borrowers. Health insurance also faces the problem of asymmetry of information. Therefore there is a need for regulations in such markets.

Finally, risk and/or uncertainty may be an impediment for free markets to provide products, which may be welfare-maximizing for the society in the future. For example, production of renewable energy and construction of transmission lines are very risky ventures at early stages of development, hence this sector will require government assistance to grow, just like railroads and system of canals did in the 19th century.

There are a host of other areas where free markets will not work efficiently and promote public welfare as envisioned by Adam Smith without some government intervention: for example, areas of product safety, workplace safety, airwaves allocation, oil and gas exploration. Therefore government intervention is essential for the working of free and competitive markets. I do recognize that government intervention in markets should be measured for efficient operation of markets. But indiscriminately diluting regulations, taxes, subsidies and user fees, which are essential parts of a vibrant free-market competitive economy, may result in undesirable consequences which no one would value.

Mathur is former chair of the economics department and professor emeritus of economics at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. He resides in Ogden. His articles also appear in vijaykmathur.blogspot.com. He offers original blog posts for the Standard-Examiner at http://blogs.standard.net/economics-etc/.

http://www.standard.net/topics/opinion/2010/11/20/governments-role-free-market-economy

India set to be first country to publish 'natural wealth' accounts

by Juliette Jowit
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 October 2010 07.00 BST

India is today expected to become the first country in the world to commit to publishing a new set of accounts which track the nation's plants, animals, water and other "natural wealth" as well as financial measurements such as GDP.

The announcement is due to be made at a meeting of world governments in Japan to try to halt global destruction of biodiversity, and it is hoped that such a move by a major developing economy will prompt other countries to join the initiative.

Work on agreeing common measures, such as the value of ecosystems and their "services" for humans – from relaxation to clean air and fertile soils – will be co-ordinated by the World Bank, which hopes it can sign up 10-12 nations and publish the results by 2015 at the latest.

The move fulfils one of the key demands of a major report also being published today at the Japan meeting, a UN study of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) .

The report was commissioned by the G8+5 major nations in 2007 in the hope of repeating the success of Lord Stern's report on climate change in persuading governments of the strong economic case to take action on saving the natural world.

The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, welcomed the report: "TEEB can have the same impact for biodiversity as Stern had for climate change and will be a useful tool to help reduce the loss of species and habitats ... economically, we have to take action to reduce the loss of our natural environment before the cost becomes too high."

Pavan Sukhdev, economist and the TEEB study leader said: "Natural capital is a massive asset class, and developing nations' biggest asset."For it to be missing from the balance sheet of the nation, or for failures not to be counted, does not make sense."

After India and the other countries that join it in the first ecosystem accounts, Sukhdev said he hoped another 20-30 would adopt the system over the following three to five years.

"The rest: if they are not with it, people will get left behind," he added. "We'll never have all 192 countries, but does that matter? The idea is to establish the direction in which national accounting must go."

After the publication over the past two years of an interim report and specific documents about the economics and recommended actions by governments, businesses and citizens , Teeb will today publish its final "synthesis" report.

This will not contain a specific headline value for all the world's biodiversity, although earlier versions have quoted huge values for individual ecosystems such as forests, and Sukhdev today talks of "the multi-trillion dollar importance" of the natural world.

However it argues that there is plenty of evidence for national and local governments, businesses and individuals to radically review how they make decisions to take into account the damage or preservation of biodiversity.

"Teeb's approach can reset the economic compass," says Sukhdev. "Do nothing, and not only do we lose trillions of dollars' worth of current and future benefits to society, we also further impoverish the poor and put future generations at risk. The time for ignoring biodiversity and persisting with conventional thinking regarding wealth creation and development is over. We must get on to the path towards a green economy."

Among the report's recommendations are that countries and companies should publish accounts of their natural capital, and how much it has increased or decreased over the previous year, in parallel with traditional financial accounts. This should help address current accounting rules which, for example, measure the clean up of a pollution spill as an increase in economic activity (by the clean up companies), but take no account of the long-term damage done.

Such all-encompassing measures would be more likely to encourage other suggested changes, such as paying people to protect or restore ecosystems, refunding people who do not cut down forests or farmers who reduce chemical fertilisers and pesticides; and better certification schemes so that those who produce products and services, such as food and drink, in more environmentally friendly ways, can get recognition and charge higher prices to cover extra costs.

The report also calls for reform of subsidies for damaging industries, such as mining and intensive farming, and tougher fines for polluters to discourage the problem and pay for proper restoration.

In a written statement for the TEEB launch and his own country's announcement, India's minister for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, said: "Teeb aims to provide strong incentives for countries to ensure decisions are not solely based on short-term gains, but build foundations for sustainable and inclusive development."

Among the figures collected by the report team were an estimate that at present rates deforestation would cost the global economy US$2-4.5tr (£1.27-2.86tr) a year by the middle of this century; while the estimated market for certified agricultural products, such as organic, would be $210bn (£133bn) by 2020. Another quoted by TEEB, by Trucost in London, found the total environmental damage by the world's 3,000 biggest listed companies in 2008 added up to at least US$2.2tr (£1.40tr).

"TEEB has brought to the attention of the globe that nature's goods and services are equally if not far more central to the wealth of nations including the poor – a fact that will be increasingly the case on a planet of finite resources with a population set to rise to 9 billion people by 2050," said Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/20/india-natural-wealth-accounts

700,000 republics

http://infochangeindia.org/Governance/Worldview/700000-republics.html
John Samuel on Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of local self-government, and how far panchayati raj in India still has to go to realise that vision

The three-tier panchayati raj system of India is the largest experiment in grassroots democratisation in the history of humanity. There are around 3 million elected representatives at all levels of the panchayat system and now 50% of them will be women. They represent more than 240,000 gram panchayats, 6,500 intermediate tiers (block panchayats) and more than 500 district panchayats. The fact that the Indian system of local governance -- the panchayat system -- has its roots in the cultural and historical legacy of India makes it different from many other initiatives of decentralisation of governance.

The idea of panchayats and sabhas has travelled a long way from institutions of traditional local governance to an important cornerstone in the Constitution of India. The 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, arguably the most substantive amendments since the adoption of the Constitution, envisage panchayats as institutions of local self-governance. The three-tier system of local governance is also meant to build synergies between representative and direct democracy and participatory governance, resulting in deepening of democracy at the grassroots level. Though there is a huge gap between the promises of substantive local self-governance and the realisation of true political devolution of power, the three-tier panchayat raj system of local governance still offers the great possibility of transferring power to the people.

Substantive democratisation works when all people are empowered to participate in governance, ask questions, take decisions, raise resources, prioritise the social and economic agenda for local development and ensure social and political accountability. Such a vision of democracy requires democratisation from below and a true devolution of power to the people. The nurturing of local democratic culture and local self-government would be the most important means to realise the promise of Indian democracy: an inclusive, capable, participatory, accountable and effective direct democracy at the grassroots level.

Though the idea of local government was discussed and debated in the wake of the movement for freedom in India, it took 45 years after independence to make it a constitutional guarantee. While Gandhi argued for Gram Swaraj (village republics) and strengthening of village panchayats to the greatest extent, Dr B R Ambedkar warned that such local governments would be captured by local caste and feudal elites, perpetuating the marginalisation and exclusion of dalits and other excluded sections of society. The present three-tier panchayat raj system, with 50% representation for women and provision of representation for dalit and tribal communities, provides a much-needed space for inclusive democracy.

In spite of the promises of grassroots democratisation, there are structural and political impediments to realising the Gandhian proposal for real Gram Swaraj. The idea of panchayati raj emerged through a series of policy proposals and processes after independence. The Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) came out with the first comprehensive policy proposals in the context of community development. Though the committee recommended early establishment of elected local bodies and devolution to them of necessary resources, power and authority, the primary thrust was on implementation of community development projects rather than true devolution of political power.

Following the Balwantrai Mehta committee, four other committees in the next 30 years (K Santhanam Committee,1963, Ashok Mehta Committee,1978, G K Rao Committee,1985, and L M Singvi Committee 1986) made serious proposals to revitalise panchayat raj institutions as per the Directive Principles of State Policy mentioned in Article 40 of the Constitution of India: “The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as unit of self-government.”

It took 45 years of political and policy process to move this from an aspiration of the Directive Principles to a justiciable guarantee of the Cconstitution. Apart from the 73rd and 74th amendments, the most important step towards grassroots democratisation is the Panchayat Extension to the Scheduled Areas Act, 1996, which makes gram sabhas(people’s committees/meetings at the grassroots level) a viable means of direct participatory democracy.

One of the major hurdles in realising the true democratic and political potential of local self-governance is the structural and systemic resistance by the bureaucracy and political elites in control of important state apparatuses. There is a tension between the instrumental value of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in community development and project implementation, and the intrinsic value of PRI as strong political institutions with regulatory and administrative power, adequate funds and fiscal capacity. Following the Balwantrai Mehta Committee recommendations, PRIs were expected to be the main vehicle for community development projects. However, funding for community development projects had stagnated by the mid-1960s and panchayats stagnated without adequate funds and authority.

Even after the crucial constitutional amendments, one of the major hurdles is that in spite of various measures to devolve administrative and implementing mechanisms to panchayats, there has not been adequate devolution of finance, functions and functionaries to the PRIs. A few states such as Kerala, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have made important steps towards this, though true devolution of political and financial power still remains far from being realised even here. In a dissenting note to the Ashok Mehta Committee report (1978), one of the members of the committee, EMS Namboodiripad, made a very pertinent remark:

“Democracy at the central and state levels, but bureaucracy at all lower levels -- this is the essence of the Indian polity as spelt out in the Constitution… I am afraid that the ghost of the earlier idea that panchayat raj institutions should be completely divorced from all regulatory functions is haunting my colleagues. What is required is that while certain definite fields of administration like defence, foreign affairs, currency, communication etc should rest with the centre, all the rest should be transferred to the states and from there to the district and lower level of local administrative bodies.”

Even now, one of the key challenges is the transition of PRIs from mere local-level implementing agencies to real local self-government institutions with political, financial, administrative and regulatory powers in setting the agenda for local social and economic development.

There have been some very bold initiatives, like the People’s Planning Process in Kerala, that point towards the potential of people’s participation in local self-governance and the possibilities of panchayats. In spite of a few such innovative initiatives to strengthen PRIs and people’s participation, there are still major structural challenges to make them the vehicles for substantive democratisation at the grassroots level. Some of them are to do with the very architecture of the governance process in India and some of them are to do with the character and nature of political power in India.

Some key challenges and issues are:

* The challenge of transforming PRIs as the location of countervailing power of people to claim their rights and demand direct social accountability.
* The potential for PRIs to become the key vehicles for social transformation by ensuring the active agency and participation of women and marginalised sections of society. Such a role for PRIs would help women and marginalised sections of society to assert their political space and demands for an inclusive social and economic agenda.
* There seems to be a strong link between a vibrant local democracy and human development, as there would be more strategic allocation and effective expenditure of resources to promote primary healthcare, education and sustainable environment. However, PRIs play a lesser role in ensuring quality primary healthcare and education at the grassroots level.
* The success of PRIs is also influenced by the effective delivery of basic services to the poor and marginalised sections. Hence, the macro-policy framework, that ensures the right to livelihood, is critical to the success of PRIs as an important vehicle for poverty eradication.
* Devolution of finance, particularly untied funds, is crucial to the success of PRIs as the means for local governance.
* Deliberate efforts to remove the administrative, legal and procedural anomalies would be important to make PRIs effective.
* PRIs offer the most effective means for social accountability and transparency. Hence, devolving financial control to them would help reduce instances of large-scale and entrenched corruption. The Eleventh Finance Commission, analysing the issue of centre-state financial relations, highlighted the need to strengthen the finances of local bodies. Hence, there is a need to have broader finance reform to ensure fiscal devolution through the national and state finance commission.

The experience of Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh demonstrates that the transfer of funds, functions and functionaries would be critical to effective decentralisation. An effective policy framework for decentralisation from above needs to be complemented with social mobilisation and democratisation from below. In Kerala, social mobilisation through neighbourhood groups and women’s groups such as Kudumbasree, proved to be an effective means to strengthen the demand at the grassroots level and facilitate the participation of women and marginalised groups in governance.

Democratisation at the grassroots level requires space for the voices of the poor and marginalised to be heard through networks of social mobilisation. Such a space for participation, demand for effective delivery of services, and demand for accountability, can strengthen the process of socio-political empowerment and capabilities of the poor. A human rights-based approach to governance is crucial for grassroots democratisation. Hence, empowerment of gram sabhas is critical to the claiming of rights and asserting the voice of the marginalised and poor. Unless the legal and administrative hurdles that often constrain the effective role of the gram sabha are removed, the potential of the PRIs will not be realised. It is important to recognise that there are entrenched pathologies of caste discrimination, patriarchy and identity-based political dynamics at the grassroots level. It is thus very important to have a safeguard mechanism to ensure transparency and accountability. There can be systematic efforts for participatory governance assessment such as social audit and people’s report card, to make sure that PRIs are not captured by the elite or by one political party or group.

While PRIs are still a work in progress, there are many initiatives that undermine the role of PRIs. For example, more than Rs 2,000 core is spent annually through the Local Area Development Fund of MPs and MLAs. Most of these funds are spent independent of the social and economic priorities of the PRIs. Such parallel systems of financing can undermine the real governance role of PRIs, according more powers to the elites of a particular political party and to bureaucratic elites at the district level.

There is also potential for PRIs to become the primary institutions for disaster mitigation, sustainable development, and water conservation, facilitation of local economies and creation of employment opportunity at the grassroots level through small and medium enterprises that make use of the local natural and agricultural resources.

The 73rd and 74th amendments provide us a unique opportunity for democratisation, social accountability, effective service delivery, poverty eradication and reduction of corruption and a more participatory democracy. In spite of all the economic growth, there is still entrenched poverty and social and economic inequality in India. When there are islands of prosperity, surrounded by a sea of poverty and inequality, the real participation of everyone as equal citizens would be more challenging than it is assumed. We may have to go miles before realising Gandhi’s dream of Gram Swaraj:

“Every village has to become a self-sufficient republic. This requires brave, corporate and intelligent work...I have not pictured a poverty stricken India containing ignorant millions. I have pictured an India continually progressing along the lines best suited to her genius. I do not, however, picture it as a third class or even first class copy of the dying civilisation of the west. If my dream is fulfilled everyone of the 7 lakh villages becomes a well-living republic in which there is no illiteracy, in which no one is idle for want of work, in which everyone is usefully occupied and has nourishing food and well-ventilated dwellings, and sufficient khadi for covering the body and in which all villagers observe the laws of hygiene and sanitation.”

Infochange News & Features, October 2010

Hunger Proliferates In A Democracy; India Tops The Chart

http://www.countercurrents.org/dsharma200910.htm

By Devinder Sharma

20 September, 2010
Ground Reality

This is a chart that should put every Indian into shame. Not only an Indian, but also those who swear in the name of democracy. How can people's representatives remain immune to the growing scourge of hunger? Shouldn't this provoke you to ask the basic: why should hunger exist in a democracy?

The illustration above [released ahead of the Sept 20-22 Summit of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)] reflects the monumental failure of the global leadership to address the worst tragedy that a democracy can inflict. Amartya Sen had said that famine does not happen in a democracy, but let me add: hunger perpetuates in a democracy.

The hunger map above is also a reflection of the dishonesty shown by the international leadership to fight hunger. Hunger is the biggest scandal, a crime against humanity that goes unpunished. At the 1996 World Food Summit, political leaders had pledged to pull out half the world's hungry (at that time the figure was somewhere around 840 million) by the years 2015. This commitment was applauded by one and all, including the academicians, policy makers, development agencies and charities, and you name it.

This commitment alone demonstrated the political indifference to mankind's worst crime. Considering FAO's own projections of the number of people succumbing to hunger and malnutrition at around 24,000 a day, I had then said that by the year 2015, the 20 years time limit they had decided to work on, 172 million people would die of hunger. And when the world meets for the MDG Summit in a few days from now, almost 15 years since the WFS 1996, close to 128 million people have already died from hunger.

And you call this an urgency?

No one across the world stood up to call the bluff.

Hunger has instead grown. By 2010, the world should have removed at least 300 million people from the hunger list. It has however added another 85 million to raise the tally to 925 million. In my understanding, this too is a gross understatement. The horrendous face of hunger is being kept deliberately hidden by lowering the figures. In India, for instance, the map shows 238 million people living in hunger. This is certainly incorrect. A new government estimate points to 37.2 per cent of the population living in poverty, which means the hunger tally in India is officially at 450 million. Even this is an understatement. The poverty line is kept so stringent in India (at Rs 17 per person per day) that in the same amount you cannot even think of feeding a pet dog. I wonder how can the poor manage two-square meals a day under this classification.

Hunger is also growing in major democracies. In the US, it has broken a 14-year record, and one in every ten Americans lives in hunger. In Europe, 40 million people are hungry, almost equivalent to the population of Spain. Interestingly, most of the countries in the hunger chart are following democratic forms of governance. And yet, the only country which has made a sizable difference to global hunger is China, which as we all know is not a democracy.

Is it so difficult to remove hunger? The answer is No.

While there is no political will to fight hunger, the business of hunger is growing at a phenomenal rate. The economic growth paradigm that the world is increasingly following in principle aims at minimising hunger, poverty and inequality. But in reality acerbates hunger and inequality. Economists have programmed the mindset of generations in such a manner that everyone genuinely believes that the roadmap to remove hunger passes through GDP. The more the GDP the more will be the opportunities for the poor to move out of the poverty trap. Nothing could be further away from this faulty economic thinking. This is the biggest economic folly that a flawed education system has inflicted.

And it is primarily for this reason that after the 2008 economic meltdown, the international leadership pumped in more than $ 20 trillion to bail out the rich and crooked. On the other hand, removing hunger and poverty from the face of the Earth would cost the world only $ 1 trillion at the most, for which the resources are unavailable. But there is all the money in the world to fill the pockets of the rich, hoping that it would one day trickle down to the poor. Privatising the profits, and socialising the costs. Isn't this political and economic dishonesty?

Hungry stomach offers tremendous business opportunities. Rich economies are buttressed by speculation and free trade in food and agriculture. Opening up of the developing economies provides them opportunities to sell unwanted technologies/goods in the name of development. Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector sees the poor as a business opportunity to bail out the companies from sluggish growth. Micro-finance steps in to empty the pockets of the poor, again in the name of development. So much so that even Climate Change provides tremendous scope to milk the poor.

All this is happening in a democratic world.

Transferring 26% of mining profits to local populations

http://infochangeindia.org/201008098448/Livelihoods/Features/Transferring-26-of-mining-profits-to-local-populations.html

The Indian government is thinking about giving local people a stake in the resources mined from their area by offering them 26% equity or payout of profits. But will government implement profit-sharing any more effectively than it implements the rehabilitation of the displaced?

Last month, a 10-member Group of Ministers (GoM) met twice to discuss one of the most pressing issues regarding India’s development: How to best compensate members of tribes whose livelihoods are disrupted by industrial projects, especially mining?

The first meeting was held on July 22, 2010. One of the proposals discussed was to “allot free shares equal to 26%” of a project’s equity to the local population affected by mining projects as well as to provide employment opportunities. The GoM failed to arrive at a conclusion on this proposal

So, the GoM met again, on July 31, 2010. This time round the ministers agreed to make the local populace stakeholders in mining. “The proposal has been accepted in principle, whether it happens through 26% equity or 26% profit has to be decided,” Mining Secretary Santha Sheela Nair told the media, refusing to divulge more details.

“The affected local population can be given shares at par to make them owners in mines and making them shareholders. For example, every person of an affected family can be given a share,” Nair said, adding: “The 26% equity has to translate to some definite amount.”

One of the major debating points for the ministers was how any shares will be allocated and how the benefits of mining will reach impoverished tribal folk. It is learnt that some members of the GOM were of the view that the affected people should be given a part of the annual profits.

But the draft bill for a new mining legislation that may be called the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 2010, provides for 26% equity participation in case of private companies.

“From the government’s perspective, giving local folk a stake in a project could be one way to win the hearts and minds of a large population of tribals in India’s mineral-rich states,” an official from the Ministry of Mines said. The mining industry, on the other hand, was concerned about how a share allotment will impact ownership and control.

Last month, the Indian government had formed the 10-member GoM headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to debate the proposed legislation to govern the sector. "After the GoM's deliberations, the Bill will be sent to the Cabinet for its approval and then to Parliament," a senior official from the Ministry of Mines had said.

At the moment, the sector is governed by the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 which has been called an archaic law, with many things proving contradictory to each other.

The proposed legislation is more about attracting domestic as well as foreign investments in the mining sector by making the process of granting mining concessions transparent and expeditious for industry, as also other issues including powers of granting mining leases, reservation of mineral-bearing areas for public sector units (PSUs) and conservation of minerals among others.

The ten-member GoM comprises senior ministers, mainly Home Minister P Chidambaram, Law Minister Veerappa Moily, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, Steel Minister Virbhadra Singh, Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal, Mines Minister B K Handique, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, as also Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and Tribal Affairs Minister Kantilal Bhuria.

At the core of the GoM discussions was how to eradicate problems arising from a lack of transparency, especially the growing disgruntlement and massive protests that have disrupted the development projects of several states, especially when it comes to mining projects such as Vedanta’s bauxite project in Orissa or Uranium Corporation of India’s uranium mining project in Meghalaya.

One of the proposals in the draft bill of course was to allot free shares equal to 26% of a project’s equity. In a letter dated July 23, 2010, addressed to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, R K Sharma, Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries, called the draft legislation “negative” and said that “not a single dollar of private investment will come to India” if the proposal is implemented.

Minister for Mines B K Handique said that the Tatas were supportive of the idea of sharing 26% of the profit of mining companies from operations in a given area with the locals instead of equity, while the apex industry association FICCI opposed the move saying providing shareholdings to tribals in mining projects is complex.

The world's largest steel producer ArcelorMittal, which is pursuing steel projects worth Rs 1.3 lakh crore in India, said it favoured a "fair settlement" to tribals for their land acquired, instead of a 26% equity proposed by the government.

H C Daga, senior president of Essel Mining and Industries Ltd, a unit of the Aditya Birla Group, said in a media interview that “such a move could hamper the growth of the mining industry considerably and thereby affect the growth of the country,” adding “this would be like a return to the times of the landlords and colonies, where we would have to give away a share of our profits.”

However, social activists have welcomed the proposal. Nandini Sundar, who has been working on tribal issues for two decades, said: “This proposal has been a demand for a long time and it will be great if it’s implemented. The tribals need to be trained and educated about the benefits of having this power so that it can be used correctly.”

A shift from receiving onetime compensation or a remuneration package to being shareholders in mining projects could certainly have a big impact on the tribals’ livelihoods, feels C P Chandrasekhar, a professor at the Centre for Economic Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

And the impact may not be as detrimental to investment as some think. According to Chandrasekhar: “Compensation and profit-sharing agreements are important, and the overall impact on the economy is almost the same as the impact of taxation. The investors might be deterred for a while but in the long run nothing deters investors as long as there is a profit to be made, and thus this might not be such a bad decision for the economy.”

The key question is whether governments can implement profit-sharing more effectively than rehabilitation programmes in the past. The Union government may be considering making it mandatory for mining companies to share 26% of profits with local communities, but its own coal producing company spent just 0.5% of its profits on corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects in 2009, according to data collected by the Chhattisgarh government.

South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL), a subsidiary, mined nearly three-quarters of Coal India's total output in the tribal districts of Koriya, Korba, Sarguja and Raigarh in north Chhattisgarh, helping itself to a profit of Rs 2117.21 crore last year, but spent just Rs 7.43 crore — a minuscule 0.5% of its profits — on CSR.

This should embarrass the Indian government when it is trying to appear less rapacious and more humane by introducing a profit-sharing clause in the new mining bill. More so, since SECL is a 'Mini Ratna', and its parent company Coal India is a Navratna — a privileged status to India's best-performing PSUs.

Another Navratna, National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), India's largest iron ore producer, made a profit of Rs 3448 crore, but spent only Rs 85 crore or 2.46% of the profits on CSR, according to figures provided by the Chhattisgarh government. NMDC has been mining iron ore in the Bailadila hills of Dantewada since the 1960s. The district today is better known as a core base for Maoists rebels.

Officials in the Ministry of Mines backing the 26% equity/ profit proposal argue that this would bring development and prosperity to long-neglected areas and would help India meet the growing demand for minerals and energy from an economy growing at more than 8% a year.

In theory, India’s tribal communities, who together constitute around 8.4% of the population and are concentrated in the country’s mineral belt, are supposed to have special legal protection against forcible dispossession from their land. Much of the land under contention is deemed protected forest, to which tribal groups are supposed to have special rights.

PESA in the Red Corridor

The Gujarat-based Institute for Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), has documented the poor implementation of PESA, or Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act of 1996. None other than Manmohan Singh had commissioned the study to know the progress of Panchayati Raj. But when the prime minister released the report two months ago, to mark Panchayati Raj Day (the anniversary of the passing of the 93rd amendment to the Constitution), the two-volume report had a chapter missing: the crucial one on the implementation of PESA in what is known as the Red Corridor.

The chapter makes statements that are critical to the current policy in the region overrun by Maoists: “There is a veritable crisis in several PESA areas with despair, insecurity and a breakdown of the rule of law and access to justice within the constitutional framework.” It further highlighted that 3/4th of the people (in PESA areas) have a low standard of living index, female literacy is below the national average, less than a quarter of the population lives in pucca houses and less than a third have an electricity connection.

The PESA chapter reportedly upset Home and Panchayat officials because it draws on the government’s own data and fieldwork to explain the ground reality. It reminded that PESA is meant to protect the tribals and emphasised the primacy of the Gram Sabha, stating that the state cannot acquire land without the permission of the Gram Sabha or issue ‘mining’ rights on tribal lands without the permission of the Gram Sabha. On both counts, the PESA chapter quoted government records to establish that the government has failed miserably. PESA is a new legislation and overrules all the land acquisition Acts. But the states overrule PESA and apply the central Land Acquisition Act of 1894 vintage to acquire tribal land at will!

On the mining industry, the chapter had this to say. “When it comes to acquiring mineral resources for industry, the stakes are similarly loaded against the functioning of the PESA Act… For example, in the past years, companies paid the state a royalty of Rs 26 per tonne of iron ore, selling it for over 100 times that, or an average of Rs 3,000. This means profits run into crores of rupees.’’

A former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh told IRMA: “Its (PESA) implementation would put an end to mining projects.”

Source: http://www.tehelka.com/channels/News/2010/july/10/PESAchapter.pdf

Private companies are known to have manipulated the process of law to acquire more and more land for mining. For years governments turned a blind eye to illegal mining. According to a report in Frontline (July 16, 2010), there are about 15,000 illegal mines spread across the country as against 8,700 legal mines and, "in several parts of the country, the boundaries between legal and illegal mining merge seamlessly".

An estimated 1.64 lakh hectares of forest land have already been diverted for mining in the country, according to the magazine, and "in the first four-and-a-half decades of independence, mining displaced about 2.5 crore people and not even 25% of them had been rehabilitated. Of the displaced people more than half were from tribal communities."

According to the Ministry of Mines, India produces as many as 86 minerals and they include 13 major minerals, namely, iron ore, manganese ore, chrome ore, sulphur, gold, diamond, copper, lead, zinc, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, and platinum. On July 14, 2010, Minister of Mines B K Handique, addressing the US-India Business Council organised by the Manhattan India Investment Round Table at the prestigious Harvard Club in New York, said 30% of the world's titanium, 13% of high grade iron ore, 8% of coal, 7% of chromite and 4% of bauxite are found as resources in India.

However, the growth rate in India's mineral sector has been pegged at a sluggish 2.8%. If it is to push the growth in mining to around 5%, officials in the ministry believe, India needs to deal with the Maoist insurgency raging through India’s tribal heartland. That much of India’s mineral potential exists in its poorest regions, where the Maoists are strongest, represents a direct threat to the country’s growth trajectory at a time when it struggles to meet demand for coal, iron ore, steel and other commodities.

Planning Commission data shows 41.8% of the rural population still lived below the poverty line in 2004-05, and here, Maoists find an abundance of potential recruits. In particular, remote tribal communities, lacking in basic government services, have become the core constituency for the Maoists.

Tribal protests against mining and industrial projects have gained international attention through global campaigning groups such as Amnesty International and Survival International. Maoist violence killed 426 people from January to July this year, up nearly three times from a year ago, the South Asia Terrorism Portal shows, spotlighting the danger of mining in India's mineral-rich eastern and central states and the challenge to the country's ability to maintain law and order.

Business analysts say India must attract $7 billion in funds by 2013 to develop an additional 100 million tonnes of coal and 50 million tonnes of iron ore to meet estimated demand and maintain economic growth of more than 6%. But, they add, investors can only be won over by a concerted effort to negate the Maoist threat and speed reform.

The business analysts hope the GoM will consider these points while debating the draft bill for a new mining legislation, revise it accordingly, and perhaps water down the 26% profit-sharing figure, before it goes to parliament early next year prior to becoming law. Will government comply with the demands of the industrial sector?

Infochange News & Features, August 2010

Australian proposes tax on mining super-profits

Is Australia about to slay the goose that lays its golden eggs? That was essentially the complaint of the country's mining sector when it reacted fiercely to the Kevin Rudd government's plan to introduce a new windfall tax on its profits. The Australian government felt the mining industry was not paying its way and had proposed a 40% levy on mining “super-profits”.

Few people outside of the mining sector shed any tears. Rudd had framed the measures saying that the nation's resources belonged to the people and that they deserved a bigger share, especially in times of plenty. Of course Rudd was ousted by Julia Gillard, who reduced the levy to 30% on iron ore and coal profits.

The country’s political and social analysts though feel the proposed mining ‘super-profits’ tax was a landmark, but resistance from a cashed-up mining industry revealed the fragility of Australian democracy.

The Australian Labour Party website put the case for the proposed tax as follows: “The existing royalties system is inefficient and out-dated and hasn’t kept pace with the increasing profitability of the resources sector through the mining boom. Before the last mining boom, the Australian people received $1 out of every $3 of profits in royalties and charges, but at the end of that boom, that rate was down to $1 out of every $7.”

It further said: “There are interests in the mining industry which certainly feel that they have been ‘singled out’: but beyond this there is a genuine case for reform; that the Australian people truly deserve a share when it comes to the natural resources which belong, collectively, to all of them.”

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://leftfocus.blogspot.com

Wetlands presented as wastelands: Undoing the lies

Uma Sudhir, July 22, 2010 (Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh)

Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh: On national television, thousands of villagers were seen running as the police opened fire. Two people died in Sompeta, in north coastal Andhra Pradesh. And in a matter of minutes, the Srikakulam cause became familiar to the rest of the country.

It is a battle that environmentalists and several villages have fought for over an year now. All to save a 90-km ecologically fragile coastal corridor between the Ichchapuram Lagoon and Naupada Swamp where at least four thermal power projects are proposed to come up. The televised protest was against a thermal plant that was to be run by the Nagarjuna Group. The broadcast coincided with environmental clearances for the project being cancelled by the National Environment Appellate Authority, that hears appeals against environment clearances granted by the Union Environment Ministry. What was a bigger victory was that the NEAA asked for wetlands around the country to be identified, so no more such projects come up there.

The Central government has decided to send a team to report ground reality once again to the Expert Appraisal Committee of the Union environment ministry. Whether it will reconsider the go-ahead to other three thermal power plants in the region is still open to debate.

In the catchment area of the controversy, 50,000 families who make their living from farming and fishing in this region are livid. Two of the four power projects in Srikakulam, they say, will destroy the Naupada swamps - marshlands that supports biodiversity, water balance and livelihoods in the area.

"Some 10,000 farmers grow two paddy crops and subsidiary crops using water from the swamp. Because of disturbing the balance, the natural water flow to six mandals will be affected,'' says a farmer, M Narsinga Rao.

Within a 10-kilometre radius to the proposed East Coast Energy project in Kakrapalli village, right next to the Naupada Swamps, is the Telineelapuram Bird Sanctuary. That has been declared an Important Bird Area, where rare migratory birds nest and feed. Some 123 bird species have been spotted here.

But all that has been blanked out in the report submitted to the Union government for environmental clearance. The NOC submitted by the state government's environment department doesn't mention the adverse impact it will have on people's livelihoods and rich biodiversity.

The biggest blow of all has come from forest and revenue officials who have, on paper, described this wetland a "wasteland" to gather the necessary permissions for the corporates who want to run power plants whereas even a cursory visit by a layman will force him to conclude otherwise.

Minister incharge of Srikakulam says at least in Sompeta, the revenue records show all the land allotted to Nagarjuna Construction Company as a wasteland. What you see on the ground, if it is different, there is no one to blame.

The State government says it accepted the information that it was presented - and then signed on the dotted line. After all at stake, for the Sompeta Nagarjuna thermal plant was an investment of 12000 crore rupees and for the East Coast Energy Project at Bhavanipadu, Kakrapalli, was 10,000 crore rupees.

To identify and certify lands, there are concerned departments and when they give reports, as state government, we don't need to doubt the veracity of facts mentioned unless proven contrary," says Vatti Vasant Kumar, Minister incharge, Srikakulam.

The central government says it's scrutinizing the issue. "Is the area a waste land or wet land? There are differing views. I have asked the Chief Conservator of forests to get back to me with a report,'' says Jairam Ramesh, Environment Minister.

As politicians try to grab the moral high ground, the villagers here are filled with anger and regret. It took two deaths on television, they say, to shake the iron-like grip of outsiders who were willing to sign away rights and livelihoods that they have no stake in.


Read more at: http://profit.ndtv.com/news/show/wetlands-presented-as-wastelands-undoing-the-lies-84551?cp

Binayak warns of a possible genocide in India

Anil S
Express News Service
First Published : 26 Jul 2010 04:31:47 AM IST
Last Updated : 26 Jul 2010 09:14:26 AM IST

“The country is fast moving towards a genocide-like situation. A major section of society is being deprived of the common property resources like land, water and forest. A section of the population is under chronic starvation. Massive displacement and corporatisation of farming has made survival virtually difficult for the poor. It is high time the country recognised the gravity of the situation and identified the focus areas. Otherwise, a genocide-like situation can occur here in five to ten years,” eminent human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen has said.

Binayak Sen, who was was in prison in Raipur for alleged Maoist links and later freed on bail following widespread protests both in India and abroad, was in Kochi.

Sen told ‘Express’ on Sunday that with about 120 million poor people in India, a possible genocide cannot be written off. Referring to the statistics from the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, Binayak Sen said 33 percent of the total adult population across the country suffers from chronic malnutrition.

“The data says 33 percent of the adult population has below 18.5 Body Mass Index (BMI) level. It includes 50 percent of Scheduled Tribes and 60 percent of Scheduled Castes. It has been found that such levels of chronic malnutrition leads to pulmonary tuberculosis and malaria,” Sen, a physician by profession, said.

While there is chronic starvation on one side, there is a decline in consumption on the other. “There has been a major decline in cereal consumption since 1991 in India. If an average family of five consumed around 880 kg of cereals a year in 1991, by 2004 it had declined to around 770 kg (that is a decline of 110 kg). But the cereal consumption is increasing among the rich. Therefore, the decline at the lower level is higher,” he said.

Adding to all these, is the agrarian crisis. People have been forced to abandon their land. Corporatisation of agriculture has led to small farmers abandoning their land. The government is supporting the efforts of multinationals. “These issues are more visible in areas of Maoist infiltration. People are forced to abandon their land.

Not only the Maoists, NGOs and a number of other rainbow organisations have come forward against these issues,” he said.

Dr Sen said there is widespread concern among people on the new developments.

Hardly does the authorities take action to prevent displacement and land grabbing in the name of development. “A major section is being denied its common property resources. We had incidents of genocide in the past. It is time the country identified the imminent threat,” he said.

Raikas demand grazing rights in forest land

JAIPUR: Raikas, the community of herders, have sought the application of Forest Rights Act and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD) in ensuring grazing rights to their animals in the forest land. The monsoon season is a testing time for these livestock keepers who graze large herds of sheep and goats-- as well as a diminishing number of camels—as crops are sown in the farm lands and the animals can find food only in the forest.

Raikas refer to the Article 8j of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, to which India is a partner, to support their demand. It commits countries to “ …subject to national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.”

Hundreds of Raikas-- men in their trademark multi-coloured turbans and the women folk in their traditional attires-- took to streets of Sadri, a small town in Rajasthan's Pali district the other day to press for the demand. The immediate cause for their anguish was the Forest Department's decision to impose a levy of Rs.11 per day for each sheep. The amount is unaffordable by the Raikas and even if they pay up, the authorities do not issue a proper receipt.

“It is not the payment for grazing that matters,” points out Dr. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson of the LIFE Network, which promotes community-based conservation and development of indigenous breeds. “They want their grazing rights under the Forest Rights Act and CBD re-instated,” she observes.

Last year, with the help of the NGOs, Raikas developed a Biocultural Protocol in which they establish themselves as a local community whose lifestyle protects biological diversity. In the protocol, they document how they do it: by preventing forest fires, guarding wildlife, and by keeping locally evolved livestock breeds. This document, and the underlying approach, generated much attention nationally and internationally.

Within the country, several other communities --such as the Maldhari in Kutch and a group of Lingayats living in the Bargur forest in Tamil Nadu-- followed suit. Internationally the Raika have shared their protocol with the leaders of African indigenous communities during a meeting in Nairobi and with a working group of the Convention on Biological Diversity held in Montreal last year.

The Raika struggle for grazing rights has a long history. In the year 2003 they took their case to the Supreme Court though matter remained unsettled. With the passage of the Forest Rights Bill in 2007-- which provides rights not only to forest dwellers, but also to seasonal forest users-- the situation changed. But the initial jubilation turned to dismay as the herders found that there was no clear procedure for claiming the rights.

“Raikas are known to be peace-loving people whose main concern is to make sure that their livestock has enough to eat. In fact they are the keepers of the genes and they take upon themselves the duty of taking care of camels,” notes Dr. Kohler-Rollefson who helped the community to get organised under an NGO Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan (LPPS). Both LIFE Network and LPPS helped Raikas to find their voice and link themselves with herders in the rest of the world.

Dailibai Raika, a traditional animal healer, explains that in Germany the local shepherds are paid by the government for conserving the environment. She and Hanwant Singh Rathore, the director of LPPS, visited Germany earlier this year and interacted with parliamentarians.

Both are scheduled to attend the next meeting of the CBD in Japan. A preparatory meeting of Indian and international herders will be held in Kuttupalayam near Coimbatore from August 13 this year.

Law, policy enforcement can help plug water crisis

Sunita Mishra

New Delhi: As the country waits with bated breath for a normal monsoon this year, experts believe that not only India, but the whole South-Asian region at large, has not realised the gravity of falling water tables and is yet to frame a comprehensive law on water management.

In a discussion on ‘Water Security In South Asia’, organised by public policy think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF) on Tuesday, Suresh Prabhu, an MP from Rajpur (Maharashtra), said there was no law to name on water management till date. Surface water, as well as ground water management had been a matter of personal manipulations in the country, he said.

India, with agriculture as the backbone of its economy, would be the worst-hit in the case of a water crisis. Currently, India has the world’s second-largest population, at 1.15 billion, and this is increasing pressure on water resources.

In 2006, between the domestic, agricultural and industrial sectors, India used approximately 829 billion cubic meter of water. By 2050, the demand is expected to double and, consequently, exceed the 1.4 trillion cubic meters of supply.

Prabhu, who was also the chairman of the task force on river interlinking and instrumental in preparing ground for reaching a consensus with the states concerned on water issues, said it was high time the government started working towards bringing all stakeholders together—lawmakers as well as the common man who is the most-affected —to frame the guidelines to tackle the issue.

There is an urgent need to sort out differences among different states within the country and among various nations within the sub-continent to fight the problems which might sooner or later affect the globe, he said. According to researchers, the South Asia, region would be worst-hit in the case of a climate disaster, he said.

“This is going to be a century of water wars, unless we sit together and give a serious thought to the problem. India, as the largest country in the region, has a more crucial part to play,” Bangladesh ambassador Tariq Ahmad Karim said. Karim has played a critically important role in negotiating the 30-year Ganges Water Sharing Treaty with India (signed in December 1996)—a turning point in relations between the two neighbours.

Karim also emphasised the need for government policies to promote sub-regional cooperation between Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal—as a means of working towards economic development and security.

Climate change is exacerbating the depleting supply of water. “Dealing with the climate is the most crucial task India is confronted with today. Unlike Europe—where there is not much variation in weather patterns—India has an ever-changing climate. Due to this, controlling flood and drought-like situations remain a challenge for the country,” said Clare Shakya, senior regional climate change & water advisor with the Department of International Development, India.

Nearly 70% of the discharge to the Ganges comes from Nepalese snow-fed rivers, which means that if Himalayan glaciers dry up, the Ganges would run dry. The glaciers, which regulate the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 33-49ft every year.

http://www.financialexpress.com/printer/news/631144/

Working Together—A Q&A with Elinor Ostrom

http://www.research.indiana.edu/magazine/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=89&catid=44&Itemid=78

In October 2009, Elinor Ostrom received The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Ostrom is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding director of the IU Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.

She shares the award with Oliver Williamson, Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of business and of economics and law at University of California Berkeley. Ostrom received her award “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” according to the Nobel Prize Foundation. She is the first woman to receive the economics prize.

Ostrom began her career at IU Bloomington in 1965 and co-founded the Workshop in 1973 with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of political science. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a recipient of many other awards. Her books include Governing the Commons, Understanding Institutional Diversity, and the forthcoming Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen).

In early 2010, Ostrom shared some thoughts with Research & Creative Activity about climate change, trust, and how to solve the “refrigerator problem.”

R&CA: You have a strong belief in ability of the average person to figure things out, but the political and economic questions of our day seem hopelessly complex. How is it possible for an average person to figure out or understand enough to take on such tough issues?

Ostrom: I don’t expect that the average person is going to be able to figure out how to get global leaders to agree on an issue such as climate change. But let’s take the example of the ‘refrigerator problem’ in an office where a refrigerator must be shared. Here at the Workshop, we have a kitchen, and we have had refrigerator problems. There’s a sign in our kitchen now that says, ‘Help us with our commons.’ We ask everyone to pitch in. We talk about it from time to time in staff meetings. We have a number of little routine ways that we all share, and it works pretty well.

Now, apply that to a neighborhood. If you’ve got a problem of, say, a neighborhood park not being well taken care of, and you have a way of meeting in the neighborhood face-to-face, people can figure things out. You might say, ‘OK, let’s go to the City Hall and discuss this. If they’ll help us out, then we’ll create a pickup crew. If we split it, and each of us does a pickup once a week or so, then we can make it work.’

We should not just ask the city to do everything. There are things they can do, and things we can do. For those problems that we can see and interact with, I’m arguing that public policy has frequently taken away the presumption of respect.

Then, broaden it out to watching what farmers do with irrigation systems. Sometimes they’ve got really difficult problems. I’ve seen farmers who have dug through a hill. That’s a pretty substantial engineering task, and the farmers have done it themselves.

When we get to the global level, what I argue is, if we wait around for global leaders and that’s all we do, we’re sunk. I’m currently trying to write several things about that. There’s a lot we can do. For example, here at the Workshop, we’re looking at different ways we can reduce overuse of our heating system.

There is a sense that what we do as individuals has one big cost to the globe. But my argument is, there are externalities (or, consequences) at multiple scales. If you bike to work, you are healthier. You’re not making a huge difference to the atmosphere, but you may be making a huge difference in your health. We need to be thinking about the positive externalities. ‘Think globally, act locally’ is not just a slogan. We can, and we must! Because up at the global level, they’re not doing anything!

Look at all that time spent [at the U.N. Climate Change Convention] in Copenhagen, and they still didn’t agree. I was disappointed. I think everyone was. I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. I had hope.

What other things can we do to have an impact on climate change? What difference do our small-scale actions really make?

I don’t want to say to others, ‘You should do it,’ when I’m not willing to do anything. You get benefits from things like composting, because you can have a better garden. Find a neighbor and figure out how to expand things, get the whole neighborhood to recycle. Then maybe you can get the city to do a little bit more, and instead of putting things in the dump, help the city by recycling.
The important question is, How do we get these positive externalities recognized and taken into account?

What should have happened at Copenhagen? What is the role of large-scale governance in this case?

For any approach taken to the global climate, there will be arguments. I don’t know if the best thing is a cap, but it might be. The problem is, if you cap, then those who’ve been big emitters can continue being big emitters for a while, and that isn’t fair to some who haven’t done anything. Getting efficiency, fairness, enforceability—all those things—into one agreement is very, very hard. This is one of the toughest problems we’ve ever faced. I’m very anxious, however, about just sitting around.

Let’s go back to the average citizen. What about competition and self-interest? How does cooperation around common resources win out over ‘not in my backyard’?

It doesn’t, automatically. It takes people recognizing, ‘OK, folks, we really do have a joint problem. We can just let a mess be a mess, but it’s unhealthy for all of us.’ It takes communication. That’s where our experiments [at the Workshop] have given us a strong foundation. If we have an experiment that involves a common-pool resource or public good but there is no communication, then people do not cooperate. There must be some way of people communicating. Face-to-face is better than electronic, but sometimes chat rooms work. There has to be some recognition of ‘we’re in this together.’ This is now sustained by a large number of experiments. Developing a sense of togetherness, norms, responsibilities — humans can do that.

Humans can also be very selfish, and in a competitive market where the good is absolutely private, cooperation means creating a cartel. And that’s not good.

You used the word ‘trust’ repeatedly in your Nobel Memorial Prize lecture. Are you hopeful about the persistence of trust in our world?

Yes! Yes. In small to medium-size groups, it’s really important. In the lab, the face-to-face communication builds trust, agreements, coordination. Without it, you don’t go anywhere.

How much trust is sufficient?

It depends on the scale. If you’re asking me for a dime because other people are putting in a dime, that does not take a lot of trust. But if you ask me to put in half my annual income? It’s a question of scale.

You ended your Nobel Memorial Prize presentation with a reference to ‘a lot of work yet to be done.’ You and the Workshop have been active recently in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions program. Tell us more about that.

The IFRI study started in 1992. We’re now working in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Nepal, India, and Thailand. We also have a new center in Ethiopia and a new one in China.

The effort is to cross disciplines so that we are doing careful research on both the social and the ecological aspects of how governance affects forests. We had an ecologist design how to take a random sample of the plots, so we go in and measure the trees and all the rest. And then we talk with people to try to find out the ways they are relating. We are studying some government forests, some private, some community forests, and some that appear to have no kind of governance.

What does forest governance mean?

Forest governance means people have made some decisions about who can use the forest, when they can use it, how they can use it, etc. It may be a government who decides, but it might be a local group or an NGO (nongovernmental organization). All of those may involve some kind of governance.

All of them succeed, and all of them fail. There is no one kind of governance that is always successful. What we are finding is that one of the really big factors affecting long-term performance is when the users themselves take on some responsibility for monitoring.

This is totally unexpected in light of the ‘tragedy of commons’ theory of earlier times, but we have very strong evidence now, and we’re talking about large studies.

I don’t refute the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in all cases, though. There are places where the tragedy occurs, such as when the locals don’t monitor things, and the government has hardly any staff.

Again, it goes back to trust.

In your view, are there resources today that should properly be held in common that are not?

Well, not resources, but I’m very concerned that metropolitan areas have moved to metro-wide or very large-scale, especially in education. That is not a common pool resource but it is a public good, and I am very concerned about it. In an awful lot of cases now, the wealthy pull their kids out of schools, and those kids get private education in small classrooms, so we’re getting segregated by wealth. That’s not good. When you see some kid who’s attacked others, look at the size of the high school or school they’re talking about.

It’s not that smaller scale is good for everything. In some cases, schools can go together as a network and order and organize more efficiently. The point is, there are all sorts of ways of organizing at multiple scales, not only big or only small. It goes back to polycentricity. [The title of Ostrom’s Nobel Lecture was “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance in Complex Economic Systems”.]

You have a new book coming out in 2010 called Working Together. What’s that about?

Yes, yes! It’s about working together! One of the real problems in working across disciplines is that we are really speaking multiple languages. Right now in the social sciences, unfortunately, we have this ‘my method is better than yours, my discipline is better than yours’ mentality, which is destructive.

The book’s subtitle is Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice. The other authors have been here as post-docs, so it’s an IU product, even though Amy (Poteete) is in Montreal now and Marco (Janssen) is in Arizona. We worked together, but we brought different skills. The book is about how you can look at theory using lots of different methods such as in-depth case studies, meta-analysis, large-N field studies like IFRI, experiments and modeling, and agent-based modeling.

We start off with where theory was in the 1970s and end with a look at where we are now. We’re trying to illustrate the ability to go back and forth, people working together and multiple methods working together. We learn X from fieldwork, then we go back to the lab where we design a new instrument for the field.

We don’t have a perfect final theory, but we have moved along quite a bit.

Do you think your receipt of a Nobel award in economic sciences makes a statement about cross-disciplinary work?

Well, I don’t know the logic of the selection committee. You can never know what arguments they had. But the award is in economic sciences. They didn’t choose the typical mathematical modeler. It’s not that I’m against mathematical models, I do game theory! But it’s the working together with other things.

Back to the average person one more time. You seem to have an endless faith in ability of people to do the right thing. Do you ever get depressed about the future?

No, I don’t have an endless faith! No! People make bad errors. But it also depends on what you mean by people. People are one thing, institutions are something else. I get very depressed about politicians, and their interest in finding ways of getting big business and others to contribute to campaigns. We can have some very, very, very perverse things happening. In the wrong kind of institutional setting, people can be very selfish. They can harm us all. Just think about warfare, think about what has gone on in places like Darfur.

What are your thoughts about governance in Haiti in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake there?

It’s a terrible tragedy, but I understand there is a lot of self-
organizing on the streets, just like in New Orleans after Katrina. There is a lot of collective action going on, which made a huge difference in New Orleans. We cannot criticize Haiti at all after the disastrous job we did in New Orleans.

Natural resources under threat from eminent domain doctrine: Binayak Sen

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050461981300.htm

CHENNAI: Natural resources in the country are under threat as vast tracts of land, forest and water reserves are being handed over to Indian affiliates of international finance capital under cover of the eminent domain doctrine, or the state's pre-eminent ownership of land, Binayak Sen, human rights activist and vice-president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, said on Monday.

Dr. Sen cited Chhattisgarh as an example of the dispossession phenomena to illustrate how the hold exercised by the poor over their resources was increasingly coming under challenge with industrial and economic development.

He was delivering an address on ‘Hunger, Dispossession, and the Quest for Justice' at the convocation of the Class of 2010 of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) here, administered by the Media Development Foundation (MDF).

“In many ways, the history of ‘development' projects in many parts of the Indian Republic are illustrative of the way in which the doctrine of ‘eminent domain' had been applied for the so-called public interest to cause major havoc and displacement in the lives of many of the poorest citizens living at subsistence levels.”

In Chhattisgarh, it had become imperative for the Indian state to assert its sovereignty under the law of eminent domain and stand guarantor for the secure sequestration of these resources in the hands of the Indian affiliates of global finance capital.

While the Directive Principles clearly mandated that all exercise of state power should be for the reduction of inequity and promotion of equity, recent trends in the use of state power clearly violated this mandate and actually resulted in increasing inequities in the areas of livelihood, education and health.

“Development in tribal areas is not only about building roads or buildings but about the operationalisation of equity, social justice and people's sovereignty. While everyone talks about peace, genuine peace cannot mean acquiescence in an exploitative and unjust social order, but rather it should be the result of a movement for equity and justice,” Dr. Sen said.

However, he said, this assertion of the state's right sparked off outrage and popular protest that was proving difficult to curb. In Bastar, popular resistance to state attempts to impose the eminent domain principle had a history that had a far greater spread in terms of duration, geographical extent as well as political and institutional identity than the current operational entity, the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

In Chhattisgarh, the term “Maoist” had become a catch-all attribution for anyone whose activities the state found inimical to its interests.

Stating that Bastar had turned into a war-zone since the launch of Operation Green Hunt, Dr. Sen cited the international Convention on the Prevention of Genocide to contend that evidence of what was happening in central India was tantamount to genocide on a massive scale because of the creation of “physically and mentally hazardous conditions which could put the survival of particular communities at risk.”

N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and MDF trustee, said though there were many problems with contemporary media, the ACJ programme had foregrounded the core principles of journalism by having no truck with public relations or other fields unlike as some schools did.

“A full-fledged media ethics programme would be an integral part of the course,” he said.

Sashi Kumar, MDF chairman, said that at a time when the credibility of the media was not as implicit as it once was, the challenge of a J-school was to have an education programme that was steadfast in upholding cardinal principles and also set the bar for the profession.

The trials of being a tribal

http://www.livemint.com/2010/04/13205156/The-trials-of-being-a-tribal.html?h=B

Caught between the government and the Maoists, tribals in India need to organize into collectives for their common interest

On Monday, news agency PTI reported that families from villages in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district were fleeing their homes for fear of reprisals from security forces in the aftermath of last week’s massacre at Tadmetla.

This is only the most recent account of the plight of tribals in India’s violence-torn areas. For years, government apathy has resulted in few educational and employment opportunities for them, leading to large-scale poverty and poor living conditions. Added to that, the Maoist menace has meant they have had to exist in an environment of coercion and violence.

Until a few years ago, the Indian administration largely viewed the Maoist problem as somehow manageable. That illusion vanished as a burgeoning Maoist cadre consistently undermined the government. The killings at Tadmetla are a brutal pointer to that might.

Indeed, as the struggle for dominance between the state and the insurgents has heated up, both sides have increasingly used tribals as instruments in their power battles. On the one hand, the Salwa Judum example shows that as security forces have stumbled, the government has taken recourse to pitting tribals against tribals, at times forcefully. On the other, Maoists have used tribals as human shields, letting the innocent bear the brunt of the casualties.

At one level, it is a problem of agency—at fault is the tribals’ fragmentary existence that makes individuals vulnerable to external forces. It is interesting here to look at a recent interview of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Ostrom builds on cooperation as the driving force of coordination, and suggests that small communities can work towards the common good provided they cooperate and communicate effectively.

Ostrom’s model has some resonance for the tribals’ situation in India. Decades of disenfranchisement and lack of empowerment have left tribals in India’s conflict zones without a voice. Their political leaders are either absent or too far removed to effectively represent them. Politically, they are orphans. In this situation, the ability to organize into organic communities, even on a small scale, can do much to help the tribals’ cause. More importantly, it will give them the ability to project themselves on their own terms, and not as they are represented by either the state or the insurgents.

Hydrological madness runs deeper

By Sudhirendar Sharma
25 Mar 2010

With the world water day gone by and a hot summer in the waiting, the case of groundwater anarchy should be back into contention.


With such exploitation, can we save groundwater reserves from depletion?

That the country's groundwater reserves have shrunk beyond redemption is no breaking news. Neither the fact that electricity subsidies remain a political tool to expand electoral base is any revelation. The only surprise being that 230 cubic kilometers of annual groundwater withdrawal, the world's highest, is still largely unregulated without any credible entitlements to those who pump it. There is no check on its unstinted intensification either.

It may have worked thus far but not before pushing one-third of 6,572 groundwater blocks into 'overexploited' category. And there is no let down in the efforts to milk the remaining groundwater reserves dry if growth of affordable water extraction pumps is any indication. An estimated 27 million of such pumps are belching out groundwater, a 120 times growth in the number of pumps that existed in 1960. It is however different matter that the affordable pumps helped poor farmers break free of the hydraulic limits imposed by gravity and open channel flow.
The fact that 85 per cent of drinking water and 60 per cent of irrigation supplies are dependent on it must however warrant a serious look at the depleting resource.

In the urban centres, however, cheaper pumping devices have created groundwater anarchy. Gurgaon, the bursting suburb of Delhi with 2 million inhabitants, is a case in point wherein unrestricted number of bore wells are consistently depleting groundwater at an average rate of 2 meters per year for the last three years. Lacking authority to ban further digging of bore wells, a helpless Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) instead warns that at the present rate the city will have no ground water left by 2017.

Gurgaon is not an isolated case; groundwater anarchy has tripled across the country in the past decade. In Punjab, groundwater in 75 percent of blocks is overdrawn; in Rajasthan the corresponding portion is 60 percent; and for Karnataka and Tamil Nadu the figure is around 40 per cent. The hard-rock peninsular region is the latest hotspot, where groundwater pumping for irrigation has run the aquifers dry. In addition, excessive extraction has led to unwarranted rise in Geogenic contaminants like iron, fluoride and arsenic in groundwater.

Unrestricted drilling of borewells increases pressure on groundwater

But for the updated data, the groundwater story treads a familiar script. The fact that 85 per cent of drinking water and 60 per cent of irrigation supplies are dependent on it must however warrant a serious look at the depleting resource. The sheer number of individual beneficiaries in the country's 'informal groundwater economy' make it a formidable 'command and control challenge'. Far from attempting to manage it, the fractured policymaking and an out-of-sync bureaucracy has thus far added to the crises by following the colonial prescription.

Else, planners would not be writing new canal projects to tide over the crises which rarely help the end users. But they have done so to keep the issue of groundwater management in abeyance. Since the colonial times, civil engineering route to water management has been relentlessly pursued regardless of the fact that irrigation economy is vastly different from what the British left behind and that it doesn't respond to the groundwater recharge question. The state's failure in making common cause with the multitudes of users is baffling!

Could there be an opportunity cost of sustaining the informal water economy? Seems so, as coercive politics in the matter of groundwater governance in the past has led to electoral debacle for two Chief Ministers, Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra and Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh. Consequently, political sensitivity does not warrant command-and-control over a crises-ridden US$ 8 billion groundwater sector. No wonder, the National Groundwater Recharge Master Plan of 2005 which promises 35 cu. kilometer of annual groundwater recharge remains good on paper.
The trouble with groundwater is that any reasonable hole in the ground is enough to abstract groundwater but replenishing the same can only be done through specific aquifer recharge zones.

It is seemingly free for all; own a piece of land and the vast groundwater reserves come along as a package. Farmers have been unscrupulously pumping water because power has been subsidized; beverage companies are mining groundwater because regulations don't exist; and municipalities enjoy unwritten impunity for wasteful utilisation of extracted water. It is a safety valve for millions of dispersed users that nobody dares to cap.

India's groundwater crisis is undoubtedly worsening, as policymakers seek shortcuts to redress water sector anomalies. The trouble with groundwater is that any reasonable hole in the ground is enough to abstract groundwater but replenishing the same can only be done through specific aquifer recharge zones. Without doubt, most recharge zones are either encroached upon or sold at a premium to realtors, over which the toothless CGWA has little control.

From electricity rationing to groundwater cess, from credible entitlements to vigorous enforcement and from change in cropping pattern to farmers managed groundwater systems, there are range of credible options that have been put on test. There is a need for the state to engage with people in a participatory mode, such that resource developers become resource managers. But as long as the political economy of land grab reins supreme, the life-saving fluid will be at the receiving end - both on and below the ground.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of d-sector editorial team.

Sudhirendar Sharma | sudhirendarsharma@gmail.com

Dr Sudhirendar Sharma is an environmentalist and development analyst based in New Delhi. Formerly with the World Bank, Dr Sharma is an expert on water, a keen observer on climate change dynamics, and a critic of the contemporary development processes.

Property Transfer and Commons in the Debate about the Right to Development

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
http://wphr.org/2010/oscar-howell/property-transfer-and-commons-in-the-debate-about-the-right-to-development/

By Oscar Howell
The world has endured a last century of strenuous armed conflicts and human suffering, one also marked by an accelerated and unequal development. The commitment to human rights in general, and development in particular, became a priority. This seems a truism, but it is a fact that the United States, among others, has refused to ratify the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESC), a complement to the Universal Declaration. This refusal has a powerful reason: a contradiction over the crucial concept of private property. What seems an irreconcilable problem, has found social and legal solutions in the past, and more recently, with the resurgence of Common Property Regimes (CPR). The use of CPRs could establish a model for implementing clear legal claims and duties in development and social organization. I will show how.

The ideas inherent in non-market regimes contradict the neo-liberal notion that unfettered market systems are most conductive to development, as expressed so adamantly by Martin Wolf: “The market is the most powerful institution for raising living standards ever invented: indeed there are no rivals.” (Wolf, p. xvii) Sure enough, markets have brought prosperity to certain population groups, but an alarmingly large number of persons still live below poverty levels and in exclusion of access to resources. According to Wolf about 1.169 billion persons lived in income poverty in the year 2000 (a reduction from 1,183 billion in 1987), which he sees as a good result given the rate of growth of population and economic output: “for it is clear that human welfare has improved greatly in recent decades. “ (Wolf, pp. 138-172)

Regardless if such numbers may represent a success of development efforts, the reason for the refusal of the US to ratify the Covenant on ESC relates back to those recent decades of the 20th century: the Cold War period. The drafters of the human rights declaration intended to cover everything considered an inalienable human right. Those rights were primarily political and civil in nature. Soon a “second generation” of human rights was established. The UN drafted two different sets of documents, the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights (PC), which was ratified by the United States, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESC), the “development” rights, not ratified. The rift was political: the Soviet bloc supported the ESC against the US bloc supporting the PC document. (see Uvin)

A second and in my view weightier reason exists for US aversion to ESC. It is an ideological reason. It is the implication that a general right to aid would have for private property and markets. The right to development (RTD) is an economic right that creates a duty to transfer property and redistribute wealth with no clear restriction. It is further a right that may encapsulate the poor as “the passive recipients of paternalistic state welfare, rather than as active providers for themselves.” (Beetham, p.49) Here is a non-viable right that would create legal and unlimited claims against private property: the wealth owned by others, who most of the time happen to be in power.

However, the US refusal to ratify the RTD does seem to go beyond ideological posturing, since every political party in power has maintained the same course. At the same time the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) program launched by the US covers much of the development issues not ratified (Marks, p.156-160) The refusal may be a negative to accept any international “hard law” that creates a legally binding system and duties for the US, in which a right to US wealth may be exerted by foreign states. The issue could be understood as national security in such terms.

Sir Richard F. Burton, an 19th century Orientalist, put the idea of delimitation of duty in unrepentantly prejudiced words: “Throughout the East a badly dressed man is a pauper” writes Burton, “and, as in England, a pauper–unless he belongs to an order having a right to be poor–is a scoundrel.” (Burton, p.24, emphasis mine) The right to be poor in religious and mendicant orders becomes also the right to aid as a socially certified destitute, a status or caste. Orders and castes are an important delimitation of the duty to help, and most certainly, the circumscription of a general duty or moral imperative of transfer of wealth.

If a right is expressed in terms of the obligation to transfer or redistribute wealth, it is objectionable when “it is impossible to specify the duties which correspond to the rights claimed,” (Beetham, p.50), in other words, when it is not clear to what extent the transfer of wealth has to be executed. In capitalist societies, the holders of property constantly contest the mechanisms for the provision of aid. The poor benefit only when wealth “trickles down”, to use the neo-liberal metaphor.

The issue becomes how to circumscribe a general right to aid, how to create a specific duty that can be limited and performed according to set laws and regulations, without becoming a “bottomless” (Beetham) problem for society? One could establish social mechanisms that promote and reward aid, like special taxes, the tequio (mandatory community work in Mexico), the diezmo (tenth of income for the church in colonial regimes), and even more complex organizations like the modern welfare state, with its system of claims and assignability. Another way is to create Common Property Regimes where the participants own and obtain profit from a good held in common.

Commons are not new. They were a widespread form property holding before the enclosure movement created the general private property with the aim of making better use of resources. Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess have argued that a form of New Commons has emerged in the last decades. The commoners participate and manage the New Commons in a large scale with the use of technology and telecommunications. The question of governance is the relevant part, without which a Commons would revert to a “waste land” as is Hardins’ concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons.” (see Hardin) New methods made possible that “community based management of […] common pool resources has proved to be enormously successful in many contexts and many societies” (Sachs, p.39).

The New Commons is what Sachs refers to when he writes about global cooperation and the need of “overcoming the importance of the market.” (Sachs p.39) It is my opinion that by promoting the formation of New Commons the misgivings on property transfer may recede. New Commons may go beyond natural resources, and encompass new areas like the intellectual property and genetic information of indigenous peoples. Other non-monetary resources like information or tacit knowledge are also area of neo-communalization. The holders of the rights receive the authority to the management of resources and its entitlements. The reduction of the role of markets and the state is the outcome. In this way, the discussion about aid would be about how to manage resources commonly held, and not about the disbursement of aid packages and property transfers. Entitlement would be a constitutive element of the social group and not the dead ink of human rights law.
References

Beetham, David, What Future for Economic and Social Rights? In Political Studies, Vol. XLIII, pp. 41-60, 1995.

Burton, Richard F, Sir, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah. Memorial Edition, Volume I. London : Tylston and Edwards. 1893.

Hess, Charlotte, Mapping the New Commons. In Governing Shared Resources: Connecting Local Experience to Global Challenges, University of Gloucestershire, July 14-18, 2008.

Hardin, Garrett, The Tragedy of the Commons. In Science. Vol. 162. No. 3859. pp 1243-1248. 1968.

Marks, Stephen, The Human Right to Development: Between Rhetoric and Reality. In Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 17, pp. 137-168

Ostrom, Elinor, Charlotte Hess eds. Understanding Knowledge as Commons. Cambridge MA.: MIT Press. 2007.

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press. 1971.

Sachs, Jeffrey D., Commonwealth. Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York : The Penguin Press . 2008.

Uvin, Peter, Human Rights and Development. Bloomfield, CT.: Kumarian Press. 2004.

Wolf, Martin, Why Globalization Works. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press. 2004.

© 2010, Oscar Howell. All rights reserved.