IATP's Jim Harkness and Anne Laure Constantin are in Bangkok at the global climate talks. Below, Jim blogs on what is at stake for agriculture.
“Fifty years: no Bangkok!
In the sea!
Hot, hot! Very hot!”
This was the very surprising, almost haiku-like declaration of my taxi driver earlier tonight. He then said, “Ice: TOOM!,” illustrating the second word by chopping downward with one hand, in a motion that to me looked a lot like a huge chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf splitting off and falling into the sea.
I am in Thailand’s capital with Anne-Laure Constantin for the penultimate preparatory talks before the Copenhagen climate summit in December. Earlier today, we had a workshop that brought representatives of grassroots farmers’ organizations from Asia, Africa and Latin America together with climate lobbyists from development and environment groups. One important conclusion, confirming what we had observed at earlier prep meetings from Poznan to Bonn, was that this kind of exchange is sorely needed, both to inform the national-level advocacy of farm groups and to deepen the international lobbyists’ understanding of what’s at stake for farmers in the developing world. For more background, see our new fact sheet, "Integrating agriculture in a global climate deal: Benchmarks for Copenhagen."
Now the connections among these groups are finally taking shape, and participants from our workshop met this evening with Climate Action Network, the largest and most influential non-governmental alliance pushing for a strong climate deal. The hope is that we can get wider backing for language about agriculture in the climate treaty that is informed by both strong science and the climate justice demands of developing country farmers. The drafts that we have seen to date have neither.
If the clearing of forests and grasslands to expand cultivation is included, then agriculture is far and away the biggest contributor to climate change worldwide. (Its climate footprint is considerably smaller in the U.S., not because our farming is climate-friendly, but because we wiped out all of the original vegetative cover by the end of the last century.) It’s also incredibly complex, and the science is so far behind the rest of what we know about climate change that basic questions—like how much carbon soils can sequester and for how long—remain unanswered. As a result, wild and speculative (in more ways than one) schemes are being promoted—including techno-fixes like industrial biochar that would take enormous areas of land in poor countries out of food production and put them into the hands of rich-country investors. Some of these schemes actually have a chance of getting into the official text.
Not long ago, we were concerned that the important role of agriculture might be ignored in a climate deal. Now it appears the danger is that agriculture will be included with such broad or vague language that the door will be open to schemes that could gobble up vast areas of land and displace food production without actually helping to solve the climate crisis.
Jim Harkness
