Will there be a global food crisis because of LCDS

Jul 06, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Guyana’s global mendicancy unashamedly marches on two simultaneous fronts. First there was the launching of the Low Carbon Development Strategy on June 8. Then on June 11, Navin Chandarpal, Special Envoy for the President on Environment and Sustainable Development of Guyana was in Toronto to engage international discourse on the New Global Human Order (NGHO) initiative.

That Mr. Chanderpal is linked to both initiatives shows how well orchestrated this con game is. Like the Low Carbon Development Strategy, the New Global Human Order is about Guyana and other developing countries getting free cash from the West. The argument in the NGHO is that the Developed World should obtain US$1.5 trillion from a “peace dividend” and that this money should be transferred to developing countries to help to fight social causes and poverty.

Before I move on to the topic at hand, the Low Carbon Development Strategy…the PPP’s dishonesty needs to be highlighted.

Years ago, the PPP travelled around the World proclaiming that President Jagan’s New Global Human Order was new. However, as Norman Girvan has pointed out: “a content analysis of the statements related to the New Global Human Order suggests that it is more in the nature of a package, whose elements are drawn from a variety of sources than a distinctly new initiative.

There is little, if anything, that is new. The proposals advanced by Dr Jagan in November 1994 and in the Georgetown Declaration of 1996 are, in the main, borrowed explicitly from existing documents and initiatives, particularly the UNDP’s Human Development Reports and the World Social Summit.

Now, the PPP, President Jagdeo and their McKinsey friends are not only blatantly lying about at least 15 things in the Low Carbon Development Strategy document, there is another lie being perpetuated on the internet. In a 3 December 2008 article by REDD-Monitor, entitled “Canopy Capital’s Iwokrama, Guyana, project “shrouded in secrecy”, indigenous residents not consulted”…..the following statement can be found:

“The Iwokrama scheme was originally set up in 1996, at a time when Guyana’s President Cheddi Jagan was keen to prop up his country’s flagging international credibility. It was established as a visionary and self-sustaining new scheme to balance conservation with sustainable rainforest use”.

Why would someone take away President Desmond Hoyte’s 1989 Initiative and give it to President Jagan in 1996? Simple. From the PPP’s racism prism, President Jagdeo is just carrying on President Jagan’s vision.

Now back to the mendicancy and the “clear and present danger” of the Low Carbon Development Strategy. If there is to be a national consultation, then real issues need to be discussed. Not the lies and false dawns that are in the document.

In my previous two letters, I touched on three critical issues.

The first real issue was the many lies in the document itself: economic growth rate, literacy, financial transparency etc.

The second issue was the unashamed and visionless mendicancy in the document which argues Guyana should receive US$584 million per year into perpetuity for its 15 million hectares of unused forests. This would imply, of course, Brazil would have to receive approximately US$22 billion per year and the other nine countries with larger forests than Guyana, an equally obscene amount of money,

The third issue was the issue of sovereignty, which the President claims would be unaffected although VAT was imposed by the IMF and the countries have been living with tons of conditionalities for decades and decades.

The fourth issue was that fundamental to the establishment of a carbon credit market was the privatization of the “air we

breathe” and ultimately the “water’ contained in the forests. Only property and its equivalents are traded on markets.

The fifth issue was why Guyana didn’t follow Brazil’s model of setting up a Fund to preserve the forests without establishing carbon credit trading. Brazil plans to establish a voluntary fund into which developed countries, companies, and other entities pay to reduce emissions from deforestation. With complete control over how the funds are spent and no allocation of conventional carbon credits to contributors, the initiative maintains Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon and gives it an unprecedented financial incentive to preserve the region’s forest cover.

What Brazil does is crucial, since it is home to more than 60 percent of the Amazon and accounts for nearly half of global tropical forest loss annually.

In strength, Guyana could have joined the Forestry eight of countries and have a better negotiating position.

The sixth issue raised centered around the chicanery and corruption involved in Low Carbon credit deals in places like Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Aceh etc. In Guyana’s case, 1423 square miles have been obtained by a company named Canopy Capital.

This company and its legal advisers admit that the deal was not adequately discussed with the implicated communities, but just discussed and agreed with the Board of Iwokrama, which has one community representative.

However, the community of Fairview that has titled lands within the Reserve was not consulted directly and communities that use the reserve and have never surrendered their ancestral ownership over the area were not directly involved.

Asked about why the deal had been shrouded in secrecy, Canopy Capital and Iwokrama advise that for reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’ it was not possible to broadcast the issue before the deal was done and for this reason also the agreement remains confidential.

It is good to see leaders in the Amerindian community such as Tony and Ron James, Dave Lewis, Gavin Winter and Sydney Allicock have raised land ownership issues and asked how the strategy would respect Amerindian rights as protected under international norms that are still not adequately safeguarded under the 2006 Amerindian Act and other national laws. Questions about the Amaila Falls hydropower project on the Kuribrong River have also been raised.

In this letter, I want to raise a few more questions which I will write about in the near future.

Question # 1: Forest deforestation accounts for 17% of the problem of global warming. Why aren’t we hearing about the remaining 83% of this problem and why is this 83% a priority for those so focused on an LCDS strategy? Methane (rice growing emits this), nitrous oxides, fluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride are all greenhouse gases along with carbon dioxide.

Question # 2: The burning of fossil fuels accounts for over 30 % of the problem. Why aren’t developed countries interested in using less power and therefore reducing their standard of wasteful living to save the planet that they have environmentally destroyed?

China has already said it will continue to burn its billions of tons of coal and will not allow its economic growth be held hostage by oil cartels.

Question # 4: Why have Brazil’s forests been devastated?

Question # 5: Will there be a global food crisis because of LCDS. To quote from the internet and “Rainforest facts”:

“As the demand in the Western world for cheap meat increases, more and more rainforests are destroyed to provide grazing land for animals. In Brazil alone, there are an estimated 220 million head of cattle, 20 million goats, 60 million pigs, and 700 million chickens. Most of Central and Latin America’s tropical and temperate rainforests have been lost to cattle operations to meet the world demand”. Seems like a massive global food shortage far beyond that of biodiesels is on the near horizon.

The paper industry in developed countries is also another source of deforestation. The website continues:

“In addition to being logged for exportation, rainforest wood stays in developing countries for fuel wood and charcoal. One single steel plant in Brazil making steel for Japanese cars needs millions of tons of wood each year to produce charcoal that can be used in the manufacture of steel. Then, there is the paper industry.

One pulpwood project in the Brazilian Amazon consists of a Japanese power plant and pulp mill. To set up this single plant operation, 5,600 square miles of Amazon rainforest were burned to the ground and replanted with pulpwood trees.

This single manufacturing plant consumes 2,000 tons of surrounding rainforest wood every day to produce 55 megawatts of electricity to run the plant. The plant, which has been in operation since 1978, produces more than 750 tons of pulp for paper every 24 hours, worth approximately $500,000, and has built 2,800 miles of roads through the Amazon rainforest to be used by its 700 vehicles.

In addition to this pulp mill, the world’s biggest pulp mill is the Aracruz mill in Brazil. Its two units produce one million tons of pulp a year, harvesting the rainforest to keep the plant in business and displacing thousands of indigenous tribes.

Where does all this pulp go? Aracruz’s biggest customers are the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, and Japan. More and more rainforest is destroyed to meet the demands of the developed world’s paper industry, which requires a staggering 200 million tons of wood each year simply to make paper. If the present rate continues, it is estimated that the paper industry alone will consume four billion tons of wood annually by the year 2020″

Does this deforestation or carbon emissions belong to Brazil or Japan and the West? In the LCDS scheme, they belong to Brazil.

Finally, Question # 7: There are now calls for a moratorium on mining because of LCDS. Can you imagine what would happen to the global financial architecture which is underpinned by gold if there is a moratorium on gold mining?

Eric Phillips

 

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