photo by Kjetil Ree (source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Gates Foundation is a philanthropic organization founded by Bill and Melinda Gates with the principal aims of improving healthcare, fighting poverty and improving education. It has an endowment of over $30 billion (€22.5bn/₤19.5bn).

On Thursday the foundation announced that it would contribute $30 million (€22.5m/₤19.5m) to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, an international fund set up to aid for farmers in the developing world.

From an AFP report:

The fund was first discussed at the G8 meeting in L’Aquila, Italy last year, where 14 wealthy nations committed to contributing some 22 billion dollars to invest in agriculture in low-income countries.

It’s amazing when an individual – or a few individuals – becomes a greater force than a country or, in the Gates’ case, several countries. Honestly, I think it’s sick. Something is inherently wrong with any system that allows millions to live in poverty while one person is a multibillionaire, no matter how generous he turns out to be. I have long suspected that Bill Gates knows this and that he takes opportunities like this to use his financial resources and celebrity-like status to encourage governments to do what he believes they should be doing. This is a political as well as charitable move.

From a Globe and Mail report:

The United States is donating $67-million and asking Congress for another $408-million. Spain has pledged $95-million and South Korea $50-million. That was billed as launch money, and billions more will be needed as the funding so far amounts to just more than one dollar for every impoverished farmer. There are an estimated 750 million farmers earning less than a dollar a day, according to the World Bank.

The action itself – like the actions of many philanthropists – is of course admirable and will hopefully be very beneficial to those farmers in need. Despite controversial anti-trust practices, I believe that Gates has consistently shown himself to be a powerful source for good. Yet the fact that an individual has the power to operate on the level of a national government – whether charitable or otherwise – is absurd and fundamentally undemocratic. What’s even more absurd is that he is showing up many governments who have not yet made good on their pledges.

From the Guardian:

Gates’s $30m contribution goes into a $875m pot put together with the US, Canada, South Korea and Spain, but far short of the $22bn agreed by the international community.

Right or wrong, we live in a world where individuals can make huge differences – and it’s not just Bill Gates. Just look at uber-rich philanthropists Warren Buffet, George Soros and Oprah Winfrey for a few other high-profile examples.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Vancouver Sun – Canada, Gates join forces on food fund

Bernama – Korea Helps Launch Global Food Security Program

Building on the success of a similar LNG bike-protest that took place in Oregon’s Washington County one year ago, this year’s “Bike-the-Pipe” event took us along the approximate route of the Oregon LNG and Palomar Pipelines in Yamhill County.  If energy giants get their way these two LNG pipelines will cut right through some of Oregon’s most valuable farm and forestland, jeopardizing the businesses of countless landowners en route to delivering a carbon-intensive fuel to the California gas market. 

Saturday morning I joined a carpool of climate activists from Portland who made the trip to McMinnville, Oregon to meet up with the Linfield College students who organized this year’s Bike-the-Pipe.  After a discussion of the negative impacts proposed LNG projects would have on the local economy and Oregon’s clean energy future, we climbed aboard our bicycles and set out to see the area threatened by LNG first-hand. 

At our first stop of the day we met and spoke with the owner of one of the nearby farming properties at risk.  Listening to community members explain how LNG companies have attempted to condemn their land through eminent domain in order to make way for a corporate project that would increase the western United States’ reliance on dirty fossil fuels, it was hard not to be appalled by the lack of respect these corporations have shown local landowners, and the impact LNG would have on the fertile farmland that’s so essential for supplying Oregonians with locally grown, low-carbon food.  The story of Oregon landowners who are standing up to LNG is one of the most inspiring examples of community resistance I have ever encountered.

In contrast to the stereotype that environmentalism is the concern of urban city-dwellers, the fight against LNG began in Oregon’s rural communities and spread to urban areas where climate activists took up the cry to defend Oregon from LNG.  More and more the fight against LNG is becoming a struggle that bridges traditional political divides, and brings people together who would not normally have a reason to interact.  On Saturday it became apparent that in Yamhill County, as in so many other parts of the state, college students and long-time farming families have begun a dialogue that might not have come about any other way, initiating an ongoing conversation about land stewardship, our region’s energy future, and the need to put the welfare of local communities above the wants of corporate profiteers. 

The crowning point in McMinnville’s Bike-the-Pipe event was when the group of bicyclists stopped at Dayton High School to meet with landowners, Yamhill County Commissioner Mary Stern, and Candidate for the County Commission Kris Bledsoe to discuss how Yamhill County can continue to fight LNG proposals.  In the wake of the Yamhill County Commission passing a unanimous resolution opposing LNG pipelines, most participants in the gathering seemed hopeful that local government can continue to play a constructive role in building pressure against LNG. 

Equally important however is the continued involvement of students and other young people in this process, for it is the power of the largely youth-driven climate movement that’s given new momentum to efforts to stop LNG.  Hearing from community members who remembered witnessing the birth of the modern environmental movement in the late 1960s, it was inspiring to realize that young people across the country are finally bringing to maturation a political force that has been decades in the making.  Linfield College students described how they hope to use their campus’ power as a natural gas customer and investor to tip the balance away from LNG, while a student from McMinnville High School described her efforts to take the struggle for a clean energy future to the area’s pre-college youth. 

Across the state of Oregon, young people are reaching out their communities and starting conversations with residents of their college towns whom they otherwise might never have met.  Events like Saturday’s Bike-the-Pipe serve not only to draw media and political attention to this issue, but to bring the diverse coalition opposing LNG projects closer together.  The youth of Oregon have spoken loud and clear: We want a future powered by renewable energy, not LNG.

Filed under: Act Locally, agriculture, Cascade Region, Climate Justice, global warming, Impacted Communities, LNG, Natural Gas

Among the panelists were leaders and experts of the global justice movement like Martin Khor from the South Centre, Maude Barlow from the Council of Canadians, Victor Menotti of the International Forum on Globalization, Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, and Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation. You can view the full event online here, or by clicking the image below. I’ll discuss some highlights and possible movement-building lessons.

Movement-Melding in Copenhagen

The experts left very little doubt that the fight to avert climate catastrophe is the fight for the direction of the global economy.

Climate justice + development justice + trade justice = true global justice.

If, as panelists noted, the climate negotiations will eventually lead to the rewriting of the global economy then global institutions like the WTO and other unfair institutions of trade and development will have to change dramatically. For decades, social movements have resisted the globalization agenda of the international corporate elite. With the threat of climate change, the world has been forced to pursue fundamental economic transformation. That transformation presents tremendous opportunity, and so comprises the silver lining on the dark, looming clouds of possible climate catastrophe.

Problem is that too few of us in the global north are connecting the dots between the struggles of the global justice movement with the current fight for a fair climate deal.

Before I say more, here are some highlights from a few leaders and thinkers who are:

- Early on Maude Barlow makes the explicit connection between the unfair and anti-democratic process that played out in Copenhagen as parallel to what we see at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. Rich countries ganging up and bullying poorer countries, divide and conquer tactics, and ‘green room’ -esque VIP meetings where the ‘real’ decision are made, without voices of poorer countries or marginalized peoples (min 7:00).

- Martin Khor makes clear that by proposing to cap emissions, that leaders are “negotiating not only the future of humanity and the earth, we are also negotiating the distribution of the future GNP of the world” [emphasis mine]. Because the five major issues areas in the working groups “are no longer about climate science” only, shifting the global economic and development paradigm is explicitly required to avert catastrophic climate change. He then criticizes the exclusive and anti-democratic process, reminiscent of the WTO process, that produced the controversial Copenhagen Accord (beginning around min 11:30).

- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz points out the importance of the historic first inclusion of language regarding human rights and land rights of indigenous and local peoples in the climate negotiation document. Also, like the movement for global economic justice at the WTO, she emphasized the wisdom of using an inside-outside strategy to influence the negotiations inside AND support the social movement mobilizations outside the convention center (min 31:00).

- Victor Menotti notes how the each of the food, finance and climate crises has been caused by neoliberal economic orthodoxy that privileges corporate power over democratic governments, and by capture of global institutions like the WTO by corporate interests (min 38:00).

A spirited discussion followed, delving into a wide array of issues:

- Gopal Dayaneni insisting that a real solution will require indigenous and local peoples winning back rights over their land, ecologies and development paths (min 44:00).

- Maude Barlow pointing out the hypocrisy of countries negotiating new trade deals that further enshrine corporate economic development paradigm that relies on over-consumption and over-extraction, while purporting to green themselves in the climate negotiations (min 51:00).

- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz takes on the question of climate debt, and how indigenous peoples have led the fight to solve the problem by opposing fighting corporate extraction projects and with them the “dominant economic development paradigm” that facilitate it (min 1:06).

- Victor Menotti relates how lessons from fighting the WTO teach that we need to call out corporate power and spotlight who wins and who loses under proposed climate solutions and their corollary economic underpinnings. If we recognize that its not a poor country vs. rich country dynamic, but a fight of corporate elites vs. the rest of us (min 1:13).

The overall upshot of the panel was that the proper venue for solving the climate crisis is the U.N. Indubitably. Just solutions will not emerge from a more exclusive and corporate-captured venues like the G-20 or WTO.

Global Justice Movement at the Millennium

The lesson here for movement builders and campaigners is another. These experts, all steeped in peoples’ movements for a more just and sustainable world, call us to act now for justice beyond Copenhagen, and beyond the next climate summit in Mexico. To answer their call we must fundamentally challenge what Victoria Tauli-Corpuz calls the “dominant economic development paradigm” – one that not only causes global warming emissions but one that sews the very injustices and inequities that Gopal Dayaneni points out are what enable over-consumption and over-extraction.

Thus a good climate agreement is not, as Martin Khor mentions, just a matter of climate science or emissions targets. It never really was. There are those within the alter-globalization movement that highlight the need to turnaround failed trade policy in order to actually stave off climate change, and the youth climate movement does as good a job as anyone linking the struggles of people in the global south with those in the global north.

But to create sufficient pressure behind real solutions we’ve still got a long way to go. We need to find common strategies for building a revitalized movement for global justice – a progressively more holistic and vibrant one that bridges all the gaps that have divided us. That means organizing to confront every single global institution that promotes the “dominant economic development paradigm” like the WTO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (and other development banks), and fight back against corporate control of our governments, especially the G-20 governments key to governance of each of these institutions.

The global justice and climate movements, then, are inextricably linked. In fact they are one in the same. and we must seize the moment and unite. Tuesday night’s visionary voices from the global south, and others representing marginalized people in the global north, proclaimed the need for just this sort of solidarity. We must continue to push the climate fight beyond the science and into the realm of global social, economic, and ecological justice for regular working people across the globe.

We in the global north need to step it up while the planet still hangs in the balance. You can almost feel the forces aligning, and hear the ranks forming. If we continue to grow together, an unprecedentedly vibrant movement awaits us.

(Originally posted at EyesOnTrade.Org)

Filed under: agriculture, Climate Justice, Climate Policy, Deforestation, Economics, g8, global warming, Indigenous, International Affairs, Jobs, Politics, Video, Visioning

rice cultivation in the Philippines – photo by jonicdao (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Typhoons in October devastated agriculture and caused heavy damages to infrastructure in the Philippines. Now a drought is destroying crops and threatening electricity supplies in the Southeast Asian nation, the New York Times reports.

Nearly 400,000 acres of farmland have already been affected, and agriculture officials expect the drought to continue, perhaps until July.

–New York Times

The government of the Philippines is responding with monetary aid to farmers and fishermen; water rationing, drilling wells and even cloud-seeding.

An AFP article credits the weather phenomenon of El Niño as the cause of the drought in the Philippines:

El Nino is an occasional seasonal warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that upsets normal weather patterns from the western seaboard of Latin America to east Africa, and has caused droughts in the Philippines before.

The government is also encouraging farmers to switch from growing rice to the cultivation of less water intensive crops like fruits and vegetables.

by Graham Land

Guest post by Kelly Barrett
If you are interested to guest post on our blog, click here to create an account or click here to contact us directly.

—

I have previously blogged about how agribusiness doesn’t necessarily have to have a negative connotation. I looked at the practices of my school’s dining service, Bon Appetit, and how they are making strides to be more local, healthy, ethical, and socially conscious.

Screen capture from chipotle.com website

So what about fast food? Does fast food have to mean non-local, unhealthy, unethical, and not socially conscious? We are beginning to see some signs that maybe it doesn’t.

Chipotle was one of the first fast food restaurants to offer fresh vegetables and ethically raised animal meat. I met Joel Salatin at the Washington, DC Green Festival last October. I remember him talking about Chipotle and how much he respects what they are doing as a business. Chipotle is one such fast food chain that is making it possible for slow food to be fast and convenient for consumers.

Joel Salatin and Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, were interviewed by ABC last year. Salatin spoke about the pigs he raises, whose meat he supplies to nearby Chipotle restaurants. He talked about the pigs in their natural environment, free to roam in the mud of the forest:

“This fully respects and honors the “pigness” of the pig. In our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Greco-roman, linear, fragmented, disconnected, systematized, all parts-oriented culture, we don’t ask how to make a pig happy. We ask, how do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper? And that’s not a noble goal.”

I think that is key here: fast food restaurants that have a noble goal in mind–to provide delicious, ethically produced food for the customers, even if it is a tad more expensive.

Steve Ells reiterated this sentiment, saying,

“Just because we serve food quickly and conveniently, doesn’t mean we have to be a typical fast food experience.”

And now, places like Burgerville are catching on. Burgerville even goes a step beyond and offers fresh, seasonal produce, so their menu isn’t always the same. The food you eat therefore changes with the season, which is how it should be! Right now, Burgerville has portabello mushrooms in their menu, which are grown right in the Cascade Mountains. Therefore, Burgerville can really only exist in that area in Washington and Oregon. Or could it? Perhaps if the Burgerville concept catches on, they can develop in other areas of the country, but it wouldn’t be easy because they would have to coordinate their menu around what is in season and available in all those different places. This could get complicated very quickly if they were to actually do this right.

But, this is a good start. We have a few restaurants on board with getting green. But how can we pave the way from here? Well, we can start by avoiding restaurants like McDonalds and Burger King and the hundreds of other fast food chains that don’t offer local, ethical, slow food and try to convince others to boycott with us. We can also support those restaurants that are doing the right thing, like Chipotle or Burgerville (if you live in that area), and try to help promote them and their sustainable, healthy practices.

But how can this movement begin to grow? There are already so many established, rich, powerful corporations out there that are unwilling to take on sustainable practices. Do we try to fix what is broken, or simply start from scratch? Do we hope those traditional fast food chains will lose their followings and go out of business when they are not able to keep up with the green-demand, or do we hope they clean up their acts?

Perhaps it will be a combination of the two. I would love to see all the “McDonalds” of the world re-work their supply chains, buying all naturally raised beef, free range chickens, and local vegetables. But the fact is, they aren’t going to do that unless they are willing to lose all the customers who only go because it is inexpensive. After all, we know that real food (that is, food that is antibiotic-free, free-range, without pesticides, without growth hormones, local, etc) is by-and-large more expensive than the “fake” stuff.

This also begs the question: How can we make sure that the restaurants that do jump on board and start offering naturally raised meats and local produce actually stick to their green business model? It is so easy for companies to get caught up in their greed and then resort to all the old ways of getting cheaper food faster in order to compete with other restaurants. We have to hold these companies accountable and we have to keep asking questions and investigating. And we have to show them that healthy and sustainable food is more desirable than cheap and fast food, so they can keep on delivering it.

By Kelly Barrett

—

Kelly is a senior at American University in Washington, DC, where she studies Public Communication and Marketing. As part of an independent study on sustainable food production she created her blog – A Local Foodie’s Fight.

Kelly has always been interested in health and health issues and loved to cook and eat. Going from being a meat-loving teenager, Kelly stopped eating meat, then became a vegan, a vegetarian again and then eventually a pescetarian, which she still is today. The main reason for these changes in eating habits where health oriented and they have taught Kelly about the power that food really has. As she states herself “The general rule that I have found is that when I eat with the right balance of pleasure and mindfulness, I naturally just fall into a healthy groove in all areas—exercise, sleep, relationships, etc.”

Around the time she was a sophomore in college, she started to consider the impact of food and food consumption on the environment. A trip to Australia and New-Zealand not long there-after made “everything sort of click into place… global warming, glaciers, Al Gore, those drowning polar bears… everything just felt really true and real” to her.

In the fall of her senior year, she then took a course called “Practical Environmentalism”. The topic that she was most interested in was agriculture. This was the start of her independent study where the focus lies on questions like “what exactly is in this food?” or “what did this salmon have to experience before it made it into my sushi?”.

Kelly is also currently an intern at Food & Water Watch and she writes the health column of her school’s newspaper, The Eagle.

We would like to encourage everyone to check out Kelly’s blog, as it is filled with interesting articles about food and related health issues. We are definitely very proud to welcome her on our blog!

photo by IRRI Images (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

The UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Agriculture and Food for Development issued a report criticizing the British government for cutting aid for agriculture in developing countries. An article from OneWorld UK describes the APPG report as detailing the link between food and security, especially in the developing world. Population growth, disease and climate change present challenges to keep up with global food production, yet so far the number and percentage of people going hungry are growing.

The report stated that with the global population set to rise at 6 million per month and almost double from 1 billion to 2 billion in Africa, simply put, the world must double its production of food – safe food, on less land, with less fresh water, using less energy, fertiliser and pesticide – by 2030, whilst at the same time bringing down sharply the level of greenhouse-gas emissions emitted globally.

–OneWorld.net

Australian Food News covers the release of another report by Australia’s The Climate Institute entitled ‘Food Prices and Emissions Trading’. The report claims that food prices are expected to modestly rise under climate change legislation such as carbon trading schemes. But it is extreme weather events like droughts – which are associated with climate change – that could severely affect farming production and food prices.

The Garnaut Report warned that unmitigated climate change would all but wipe out farming in the Murray Darling Basin by the end of the century and called for global efforts including Australia reducing 2000 carbon pollution levels by 90% by mid-century.

–Australian Food News

For more on how climate change might impact global food production, check out this video presentation from the Economist entitled ‘Climate change and food’:

‘Two models differ in details but agree that food will grow more expensive as the earth warms’

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

The Economist video and audio

This post is provided on behalf of Project Survival Media – a grassroots, student-run media project designed to highlight the true costs of fossil fuels in the lead up to Copenhagen. 

On the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks, communities and individuals around the planet are thinking about survival.  In a world of rapidly destabilizing climates, this word means different things to different people.  To the citizens of the Maldive Islands survival may mean a keeping global temperatures low enough to prevent the permanent flooding of their homeland, while to the inhabitants of African nations that repeatedly have expressed frustration with the unwillingness of industrialized countries to listen to what our own climate scientists are telling us, the main threat to survival may be catastrophic drought threatening to engulf huge regions. 

One key to survival for human beings everywhere, though, is food.  A couple of weeks ago for Project Survival Media, I wrote about the struggles of farmers to build communities based on sustainable food in my own home state of Oregon.  In the Northwestern United States we’re lucky that most people have relatively easy access to healthy, locally grown food; meanwhile, in West Oakland, Project Survival Media team members have been documenting the difficulties of maintaining a healthy diet in the “food deserts” of the inner city.  In the end, our reliance on processed, packaged and fast food produced through industrial agriculture is hurting human health as much as an input-heavy oil-based agricultural system is hurting the Earth and the climate.

As the world seeks to stabilize the global climate and provide for the food needs of a growing population, it would be a mistake to assume the only or best way to feed the starving is through the same model of industrial agriculture that’s helped bring us to the point of environmental disaster.  Recent research indicates that sustainable farming practices and a shift in industrialized countries to more sustainable diets hold the potential to feed the world without wrecking the climate.  Indeed, a healthy planet and a healthy human population may each hinge on a diet less dependent on meat and oil-intensive agriculture, and more reliant on locally based food production systems.

One of the most environmentally resilient food productions systems I’ve ever observed exists in the forest villages that line the Amazon River outside of Iquitos, Peru.  In these small, traditional villages, farmers grow an astonishing variety of crops using methods that have sustained them for hundreds of years, and virtually no fossil fuel inputs.  Walking along a path through a village banana plantation, it’s occurred to me that there is no place I’d rather be during a global petroleum shortage or climate catastrophe that wreaks havoc with our import-oriented food supply chain.  Agricultural systems grounded in small-scale local food production not only contribute less to global warming, but may prove to be more resilient to a changing climate as well.

A continent away from the villages outside Iquitos, I have watched what seems to be a genuine trend, at least amongst Oregon farmers; the owners of small farming establishments are growing increasingly conscious of the unique role their industry will play in sculpting a world resistant to global warming.  For decades, the number of farms in the US has shrunk as family farms died out and industrial establishments gobbled up what was left over.  Yet today, small farmers have a new reason to take pride in their work, and society has renewed incentive to value its farmers.  Home gardens and local farms can bring relief to the food deserts of our large cities, while breaking the oil industry’s grip on our food production system.

In a time of global danger, nothing says “survival” like the ability to purchase healthy food that’s independent of a fossil fuel-based import system, and contributes to creating sustainable economies.  As the world’s most powerful people gather in Copenhagen this month, let’s hope they take note.

Posted in agriculture, Americas, Cascade Region, Climate Policy, global warming, Impacted Communities

Reporting for Project Survival Media in Romania.
By Andrada Farcău with images by Mihai Giurgiu.

©Mihai Giurgiu

Romania was a land of diversity. We used to have four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Now we are having two seasons. So, what can be the reason of changing? It could be a natural transformation, just a temporary phenomena or the global warming. All Romanian people are affected by this change: their lands are not that good as before, their fruit production has problems and people have to fight more against the floods. The Romanian scientists say that we can’t prove yet if one of the causes is global warming or not and if the human race is responsible of it.

©Mihai Giurgiu

Săcel Mountain is a little village in Romania. Here, farmers used to have more than 600 sheep, 300 cows, lots of pigs and other animals. Now, they don’t have sheep anymore, and a family has maybe a cow and no more than two pigs.

The agriculture was strongly based on potatoes, corn and tomatoes. The altitude (771- 1125 m) of the village didn’t give people the possibility of having something else. But now, they are concerned because of the harder conditions to grow their vegetables and fruits compared with 20 years ago.

Asking people if they noticed possible changes regarding the four seasons, their answers are simple and complex at the same time. However, they are not surprised about the question, because those facts affect every corner of their life. Why? Their food and their entire activity are limited on agriculture and farming. Therefore agriculture means land, weather, rain, snow, ice, sun and a good connection between all these natural phenomena.

“Nothing good is happening anymore”

Older people (their ages are between 60 and 80 years) are concerned. They have lived enough to have an experience of appreciation about good or bad results of “their agriculture”. The Oneţ family has lived in Săcel Mountain for almost 55 years. They had a little farm in the past with sheep and cows. Now they have one cow, two pigs and ten chickens, and they practice agriculture for their own use.

©Mihai Giurgiu

“I remember when I was younger and the snow was so big that I could hardly go out just in the neighborhood. Since a few years ago, winters are warmer and it’s rarely snowing hard. I saw on T.V. that in places where it has never snowed, last years they had snow. As I can see, the snow left us and moved to other places, which is bad, because the land is freezing and it’s losing its good properties. When spring should be here and have good rain, it is freezing again and after few weeks of warming we lose our fruits. We have less and less vegetables and fruits. All the time when it should be raining is drought. When it should be warm is raining too much. Nothing good is happening anymore”, Ms. Oneţ.

Last ten years, people lost their crops because of ice rain: “This ice rain was rare when I was young and I never heard my parents complaining about it, but now… a big part of our cultivation is destroyed. We don’t know what to do about it. We are old anyway and our children live in the city” says Ms. Oneţ.

Missis Oneţ showed us some corn from the past year and gave us a gift: a pocket of walnuts.

Changes produced by man, still a supposition

Florin Moldovan, scientist and teacher at Geography University from Cluj Napoca, has a balanced opinion about the weather changes in Romania: “It is too soon to say something that big like climate changes are caused by human behavior. Until now we just can say that dangerous phenomena are more frequent and intense. You have to understand that we don’t have enough proof in this way and we don’t have relevant statistics about it”.

The floods made them change the road trough the forest

©Mihai Giurgiu

In summer of 2005 Săcel Mountain was affected by floods, created by unusual powerful storm and rain. The weather devastated some lands, a bridge and a few houses. About that time, people have bad memories: they were isolated and helped with provisions by Romanian Government.

The oldest people from the village remember that floods like these began in last 20 years, but the worst was four years ago: “We couldn’t use our cars to get aliments to the village and we had access to the other communities only through the forest”.

©Mihai Giurgiu

Virgil and his parents are saying that things are changing: “The summer is dry now, but in the same time we have floods. The rain is not enough to naturally irrigate our lands, and we have a big storm during the year that makes bad things happen. And that’s it. It rains often in autumn and spring, but this will never help the land. It will destroy it. Those situations are totally different than 20 or 50 years ago”.

People from Săcel Mountain feel some changes about their weather and scientists approve those opinions. A tendency of increase in average temperatures is clearly visible and demonstrated. Romanian scientists are declaring that the stats are clearly showing an increase in frequency and intensity of meteorological risk phenomena during past years. They are reserved in saying for sure if this is human fault or if Mother Nature is doing its circuit, but anyway a change in human mentality concerning climate change is a must.

Posted in agriculture, Europe, global warming, Impacted Communities, photography

This post is provided on behalf of Project Survival Media – a grassroots, student-run media project designed to highlight the true costs of fossil fuels in the lead up to Copenhagen.  As part of this initiative, Project Survival Media team members in California and Oregon are documenting industrial agribusiness’ contributions to global warming and displacement of communities, as well as the role which small, sustainable farms can play in creating a more viable and just food-production system.

When Anne Berblinger delved into the world of small-scale organic farming in 1991, the concept of global warming had not yet entered mainstream consciousness in the US.  “It wasn’t at the top of everyone’s mind,” says Berblinger while slicing freshly harvested peppers in the kitchen at Gales Meadow farm – a site she and her husband Rene’ have been farming since 1999.  Yet though climate concerns had yet to penetrate mainstream thought in the early ’90s, Berblinger says she was inspired to take up small farming in part out of her feeling that “the earth was in peril.”  Motivated by concerns about soil, wildlife, and the other casualties of industrial agribusiness she says, “Having a small piece of land to care for and be the steward of seemed important.”

Today, Anne and Rene’ Berblinger and a team of youthful helpers, many of them recent graduates of Pacific University, cultivate more than 200 varieties of certified-organic herbs and vegetables on the nine flat acres of Gales Meadow Farm. Many crops at Gales Meadow are heirloom varieties not found in the industrial farm zones that have given way to endless high-yield monocultures.  Each plant variety has a history, dating back to its origins in the traditional farming communities of Europe, North America, or elsewhere.  Every carefully cultivated strain represents a reservoir of genetic diversity – a diversity that’s become all the more important to bolster our agriculture’s resilience in a world where modern high-yield crops may turn suddenly vulnerable to changing climates.

Today, Berblinger cites global warming and the dangers of fossil fuel dependence as a major reason to reduce the scale of agriculture.  Small-scale farms cultivating a diversity of traditional plant varieties are not only more resilient to climate destabilization, but have the potential to replace industrial agriculture operations – today among the leading contributors of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  The fertile farmland of Oregon’s western Washington County, where Gales Meadow Farm is located, is home to both types of operations.  And the monotonous stretches of monoculture fields, propped up by heavy inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, could hardly be more different from sustainable, organic operations like Gales Meadow.  In addition to vegetable fields, greenhouses, and a large chicken pen, Berblinger’s property also supports a forested hillside and a stretch of riparian zone where cottonwood trees thrive beside the waters of Gales Creek.  According to one rough estimate, Berblinger reports, the farm is actually carbon negative, with its trees and other vegetation absorbing more carbon from the air than is produced by machinery and other sources of emissions.

Asked if government policies need to be reformed to smooth a transition to sustainable farming, Berblinger replies, “Absolutely.”  Like renewable electricity start-ups attempting to compete with coal and gas providers, sustainable farms face an uneven playing field.  Just as the US government has handed out subsidy after subsidy to make electricity from coal appear cheap, so industrial agriculture has benefited time and time again from policies favoring energy intensive, oil dependant, large-scale agriculture.  If the world’s international powers are serious about addressing the threat of global warming, they cannot afford to ignore the contribution of Big Agribusiness.  Re-scaling agriculture to feed a growing population with sustainable food will mean eliminating unfair subsidies, and doing away with international trade pacts that favor giant corporations over small home businesses like the Berblingers’.  Were the barriers to localized farming removed, Berblinger believes that many more young people would flock to a way of life that carries with it a certain self-sufficiency and the ability to contribute to a community’s needs.

Walking the rows of heirloom peppers in the Gales Meadow front garden, or watching a red-tailed hawk circle above the forested ridge behind the farm, it becomes momentarily difficult to remember that like small, sustainable farms across North America, this place is the scene of a frontline battle against the forces of corporate globalisation and industrial climate insanity.  Yet the truth is, Gales Meadow is even more directly impacted by government policies favoring the fossil fuel industries than are most small farming operations.  If giant energy companies get their way, Gales Meadow could be sacrificed through eminent domain to the right-of-way for a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline, proposed by Oregon LNG to shunt imported gas through Oregon to the California market.  This fossil fuel infrastructure development project threatens to destroy years of hard work at Gales Meadow, making it impossible for the Berblingers’ home business to survive.  Right now Oregon LNG and other LNG developers are seeking eminent domain status for their projects, which would allow them to lay pipelines through landowners’ property without receiving permission from the landowner first.

Perhaps there is no more apt symbol of the current political system’s skewed priorities than a pipeline built directly through some of the Northwest’s most fertile farmland, to deliver a foreign fossil fuel to an increasingly globalised gas market.  Yet beside the rows of giant yellow, green, and red peppers at Gales Meadow, it’s impossible not to feel a certain faith in the future – the same faith that the traditional farmers who cultivated so many plants now grown on Berblinger’s property must have felt as they passed on the seeds of their crop to the next generation.

In attempting to follow the complex ins and outs of the international climate negotiations in the lead-up to Copenhagen, and the intricacies of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill’s slow progress through the US Senate, it’s easy to get bogged down in a feeling that such high-profile discussions sometimes devolve into mere political bickering.  However for communities which are already making ready to deal with the impacts of a changing climate, and for which struggles against the globalised fossil-industrial complex are a daily fight, there can be no compromise on sealing a global deal that works for the planet.  With the Copenhagen climate talks less than a month away, the peaceful scenery of Gales Meadow Farm is a poignant reminder of what we stand to lose with a failed global treaty – and of what we can gain with a return to local, climate-sane policies for all.

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