Food and Energy Security: Local Systems Global Solidarity

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27 Sep 2005 15:02:30 -0000

Food and Energy Security: Local Systems Global Solidarity

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ISIS Press Release 27/09/05

 

Food and Energy Security: Local Systems Global Solidarity

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Alan Simpson MP offers a brilliant analysis of what's wrong

with current national and international policies on food and

energy and why we must break all the rules

 

 

The new political divide

 

 

It's the strange nature of our times that's defining a quite

different politics. The defining difference now is between

those who want to address, with a degree of urgency, the

challenges of climate change and the way it is going to

rewrite all of the rules that will determine how we live our

lives, and those who don't.

 

 

 

And that doesn't cut easily on party lines. We have exactly

the same divisions in pretty much all of the parties at the

moment; and that requires us to be willing to look at a

number of heresies. I wanted to explore some of those

heresies, partly to challenge, but also to excite. What I

want to put to you is that this is a time when we ought to

be openly advocating the case for breaking all the rules,

because the current rules don't work; they are taking us

deeper into an accelerating crises, and breaking the rules

is a sensible way of saving lives. I think we ought to be

giving platforms to that degree of irreverence.

 

 

Breaking old rules for new

 

 

So the alternative to today's Washington consensus neo-

liberal agenda of global free trade is a different basis on

which way the world works, and that for me would have to be

global rules base for essentially localised sustainability

systems.

 

 

 

It is not to turn our backs on internationalism, but to

understand that today and tomorrow's internationalism is one

of connectedness, of solidarity (that was term that the

Archbishop of Canterbury used), the solidarity of witness

and a different form of " gift relationship " , as I shall

explain later.

 

 

 

What we have to be looking for would include a rules base

that enshrines the right to produce to meet your own

security needs before accepting the need to produce to meet

anyone else's needs. It would include a right to hold

essential resources in public ownership rather than see them

carved up for private gain. There has to be a shift in the

way in which we use our fiscal resources for subsidies that

promote sustainability. In other words, it is not the

eradication of subsidies or the existence of subsidies

that's the problem; it's the current use of subsides to

distort and destroy the ecology that we depend upon for

tomorrow.

 

 

 

Included within that global rules base must be an absolute,

absolute rejection of patents on food. We have to take that

out, and the quid pro quo that goes along with that is to

establish the universal farmers rights to save seeds. And

then the issues that emerge would be about how we feed the

world rather than who owns the food chain. We then have to

go on to look internationally at the case for global eco-

taxes. There is a need to replace the WTO with a different

global organisation, one that's focussed on a sustainable

global ecology.

 

 

 

And that would be the interconnectness of a global framework

within which we may have the prospects of survival.

 

 

Triple crises and their origins

 

 

There are three interconnected crises facing us now: the

crisis in water security, the crisis in energy security, and

the crisis in food security

 

 

 

Mae-Wan Ho said that global food production has been

declining over the last four years. But we need to connect

those to some of the other pressures that we face in every

part of today's global economy. It terms of water, within

the 20th Century, global water consumption increased six

fold – twice the rate of population growth. There's a fair

majority of people who will expect, within reasonable

circumstances, to still be alive in 2025. Many will have

children of their own by 2025 that they don't have now.

But the figures for global water crises suggest that by

2025, in twenty years time, the proportion of people on the

planet who will be living in areas of " significant water

stress " will rise from 34 percent to 63 percent. In absolute

numbers it's a total sum of about six billion people, which

is the entirety of today's world population. So we cannot

go on using those water resources in the profligate way we

have been doing. Water uses tie in to a different form of

ecological auditing.

 

 

 

Huge amounts of the water resources have gone into

agribusiness, the business of overproduction from the land,

in order to produce food surpluses in the industrial world

that are then dumped on the developing world in order to

undermine the sustainable agricultural base that they

themselves ought to be able to rely on. So we are

squandering water in order to destroy the viable economies

of both the North and South.

 

 

 

The same is true in relation to energy. If we were to do an

energy audit of where we are now, what we would find is that

within our own country, we know that in today's power

stations, 70 percent of the energy is dissipated as waste.

We pump huge amounts of water back into the atmosphere

through cooling towers in order to just generate the energy

that we have.

 

 

 

Globally we have a massive misuse of subsidies. Subsidies

in the wrong direction that have gone primarily into

sustaining the production of coal, oil and gas. £235

billion a year globally is going into the energy subsidies

and into energy systems that actually accelerate the crises.

 

 

 

So it isn't that we're short of money, we have huge

resources of money, but we are using them to accelerate the

crisis rather than the reverse it. And I'm genuinely

excited about the possibilities of reversing it.

 

 

The Woking miracle

 

 

I have to confess that I never, ever in my life thought that

I would say that a revolution of any sort would have begun

in Woking! I'm sorry if anyone reading this is from Woking.

It just has never been a place that's stirred my loins, in

thinking that's where revolutions could happen, but it has!

And within the next couple of years Woking will be going off

the National grid because it generates more energy than it

needs. It is currently generating 135 percent of its energy

needs from renewable and sustainable sources. They include

hydrogen fuel cell technology, which also happens, to

provide a by-product of pure water. Something like one

hundred thousand gallons of pure water a year as a by-

product. And this is going back into the depleted water

resources, back into the local economy.

 

 

 

What Woking also discovered is that not only are our

national power stations massively inefficient in the way

they work, but that the national grid is massively

inefficient. For every pound's worth of electricity that

Woking was putting into the grid, it was costing them pretty

much £20 to get it back because of a whole series of leaks

in the generation system, the distribution system and

various taxes at different stages. So they found that it

was much better for them to have bought and installed the

wiring system for the whole of Woking. They have reclaimed

the ownership of their local energy system and they invite

people to sign up to energy services contracts, not energy

consumption contracts, but energy services contracts in

which some of you are actually are having solar roofs

installed as part of the contract because the system

generates wealth as well as generating warmth and well-

being. They have cut the energy costs to the fuel-poor.

This government's target is 10 percent of income. Woking

have cut them to 6 percent of the income of the poor and

this has all been done and it's not just on a local scale,

somewhere tucked away beyond some serious consideration.

 

 

National governments have lost the plot

 

 

What's happening now in London is that London did a global

search of whom to appoint as their climate change co-

ordinator and they pinched the guy from Woking. His remit

is to make London energy self sufficient within a decade.

Now that is not messing around, this is a really serious

consensus of how we can generate our energy needs from and

with renewable sources within a decade without destroying

the prospects for the future. And not content with doing

that, London is already in discussions with twenty-five

other global cities that are saying, actually we're giving

up on national governments because they've lost the plot.

We're going to do it ourselves. We will try and have this as

a globilized initiative in which we share the resources of

our know-how on a " gift relationship " basis so that we can

all survive.

 

 

 

So the scale upon which this can take place is awesome if

only we are to understand it and to engage it. The only

people who don't want to do that by and large are the

majority who are occupants of this place (the House of

Commons) but there are honourable exceptions and I say those

exceptions are across different parties. But the momentum

for that change will come, and is already coming from

outside, and that is phenomenally exciting, absolutely

astonishing. So that's where, I think, we need to be

heading, and I'll just point out that neither Woking nor

London nor any of the other global cities who are in this,

none of them are making an assumption that there is a single

part of the energy components that will be nuclear. So all

of this can go and run in a quite different way. And it

ties in to the food agenda.

 

 

The slow food movement

 

 

I went to a fascinating conference last November in Turin.

It was convened by the Italian slow food movement, which had

brought together five thousand representatives of food

communities in 132 different countries, many of whom didn't

have passports; they didn't even have ID documents. But

they were looking at how they could share their knowledge of

sustainable food production in ways that offered common

ground for long term viable futures. And I have to say that

in some ways the most exciting of the discussions was one

between farmers from Afghanistan and Columbia who were

talking not about problems of drugs production, but about

the production of raisins in Afghanistan and savannah fruits

in Columbia as a basis of earning a living, feeding their

families, producing goods that other people needed that were

non-destructive of other peoples futures. Now all of this

was going on in defiance of the WTO negotiations, and I

think we have to come out here as advocates of that

defiance.

 

 

 

I suggest we can tie our ropes together in a different way

from the one that is being driven through the WTO. I said

this to those who are part of the Make Poverty History

campaign, that if we genuinely believe that all that's

needed is to free the Southern Hemisphere to get into more

genuinely free trade competition with the North, and then

remove the barriers, you ought to look at some of the work

that people like Caroline Lucas has done about the

ecological consequences of large distance goods distribution

and the sheer volume of fossil fuels that are consumed in

the process of shipping goods from one side of the planet to

the other.

 

 

The new " gift relationship "

 

 

What really hacks me off is that we are now a net importer

in this country of parsnips. And I say that as someone,

who, as a child, bore a grudge against my father for the one

thing he was good at, which was producing endless supplies

of sodding parsnips. The notion that Britain has to be a

net importer of parsnips just seemed to me to be completely

barking mad. But what we can do is to touch base with

sustainability, the notion of taking out and putting back

into the land in ways that conserve and hand on. And this

is the point I want to finish on, the gift relationship.

 

 

 

As a child and then as a student, I grew up with a very

specific understanding of what the gift relationship was. A

sociologist called Richard Titmuss defined it, and it was

enshrined in the blood transfusion service in the UK, one of

the most wonderful gifts to any generation that Britain

could have come up with. The beauty of the blood

transfusion service is that when you go in and you fill in

the form and you have your thumb tested and you give your

donation, no one lying on the beds ever says " Can you tell

me how much I've got in my account? What's the rate of

interest? Is it a high risk account?

 

 

 

We never assume that we are making those contributions into

our own personal, private accounts. We do so as a gift to

others in the assumption that if anything happens to

ourselves, to our children, to our neighbours, there will

always be enough in that common pot to meet our crises

needs. And so no money changes hands, no interest ever gets

paid. It is a gift of solidarity from one person to

another, from one generation to another. And that is what

has to underpin the thinking of an international symbol of

survival for us through the 21st century.

 

 

 

The problem in the developing world is the affordability of

being part of an ecological agenda. China is saying that

within a decade they're promising to increase the rate of

car ownership such that every family with one child will

have a car. It will raise their car ownership from 33 per

thousand to 333 per thousand. Multiply that by the numbers

of families in China and you have an increase in car

production and car emissions that will threaten to act as an

ecological tsunami to virtually all other emissions gains

that the world seeks to make. In order to do this they're

trying to increase their production base and the energy

requirements needed to sustain it and that is based at the

moment on a commitment in China to build 500 new coal power

stations. Now this is dragging everyone in directions that

will be disastrous. But if they're not going to do that

they have to pick up the demands that were first made when I

first got into this House by the then Chinese environment

minister. She came here are a time when we were starting to

talk about our national commitment to remove or replace the

ozone damaging fridges containing CFCs and HFCs and replace

them with non-ozone damaging fridges. She listens to this

and said this is fascinating, within a decade you'll

probably do it, you'll probably remove maybe 20 million

ozone-damaging fridges and replace them with 20 million non-

damaging fridges and that's great. But in the same decade

in India, Indian families will assume the right to acquire

fridges themselves. There will be 200 million fridges

acquired in India during the same period. Now history tells

us that the fridges in India will be all the craft

technology you've banned or abandoned and dumped on us as

aid in bilateral agreements that " gift " us poisonous

development.

 

 

 

Indian families have no desire to poison the environment.

What they want is the same ecologically responsible

programme as you. If that's the case the Indian family that

aspires to have a fridge has to be able to afford a non-

contaminating fridge and that means you have to gift the

technology, you have to gift it. If the quid pro quo is

that we agree in return not to overload the basis of your

own economy by just dumping our capacity to produce things

in vast quantities on your society then fine, have that as a

protectionist barrier. But allows us to be part of an

agenda that reaps legitimate aspirations of our own families

without destroying the aspirations and survival prospects of

yours. So that is where I think the gift relationship will

come in. None of it is deliverable within a free trade

agenda. I think we have to find a way to be willing to stand

up and say that. The advisors around Downing Street fail to

hear this. They insist that there is a separate agenda, I

think largely driven by Washington that they still have a

remit to deliver on. It is why coming back to the food

issue that as a society we may have rejected the right of

the producers of GM crops to be able to dump them into our

food supply chain.

 

 

 

But at the European level, every time there is a crop

approval permission that is sought the UK has voted to

approve every one despite the fact that as a society we have

rejected them and despite the fact that at a European level

other countries have sought to protect themselves and us by

asserting the right to a national veto. Britain alone is

pushing the case for the removal of a right to national

vetoes to refuse to endorse GM crops. So this mandate

hasn't come from Parliament. Peter (Ainsworth MP) and I

haven't been asked about this, the public hadn't been asked

about this. It has come from a set of corporate lobbyists

who have freewheeling agreements to go into Downing Street

and to write the ministerial script. And that's why I think

that the challenge that has to come is a reclaiming of the

agenda, away from that sense of corporate greed in the short

terms and in favour of something that will allow us all to

survive in the long term.

 

 

 

This article is from a transcript of Alan Simpson's speech

at the Sustainable World International Conference 14-15 July

2005 in UK Parliament, Westminster, London (transcribed by

Sam Burcher, edited by Mae-Wan Ho).

 

 

 

Sponsor our Sustainable World Global Initiative here:

http://www.indsp.org/SustainableWorldInitiative.php

 

 

 

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