Developed to Death

Even Ban Ki-Moon says that the rich nations have caused the food crisis, and that the biofuels craze is a big part of the problem:

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/sgsm11541.doc.htm

Special Rapporteur on Food Jean Ziegler concurs and is now much-quoted as saying biofuels are a crime against humanity and that there should be a moratorium on the production of biofuels. Moon still sees "more trade" as the long term solution to the crisis. More exporting and importing the fruits of the earth this way and that, which is always concentrating them in some peoples' hands and grabbing them out of others'. Moon sees this as dissolving all the inequity in the not so distant future, redistributing wealth appropriately if only it would be done right...

Hopefully Ziegler does not forget what he knows. He should keep reminding Moon about the magnitude of these problems and about other facts he knows, such as that even non-food biofuels are mercilessly destroying livelihoods and dispossessing more and more peasants from their food-growing lands with promises of robust new cash crop incomes (as George Monbiot has pointed out). The gamblers that are promoting the biofuels market are running their investment experiments on living people and their communities and livelihoods, and on what used to be living ecosystems, and they are lying about who will benefit.

It may be that there is too much to say, too many illustrations to share, for this blog format to be helpful in understanding all these issues. We'll try anyway, guided by the idea that "just putting it out there" can have some positive effect. We'll start collecting the evidence here, sort it all out later. It's an open inquiry.

So on the topic of "more trade, more development equals endlessly more good things and higher living standards for all," here's a minority view: In the winter 2008 issue of dissent magazine Thomas Pogge took a look at the UN's Millennium Development Goals and the presumed good they would do, and showed that the recalibration of measures of poverty can allow governments (just like big polluters "offsetting" or "neutralizing" their carbon) to claim progress on alleviating all the bad in the world, while actually these governments are doing very little:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=990

Pop economists like Jeff Sachs would do well to listen to people like Pogge.

And for those who need their information on the effects of corn in our gastanks a little more audiovisual (and/or hilarious), watch The Colbert Report, episode 385, from April 29, 2008, The Word segment called Kernel of Truth:

http://thecolbertreport.com/