Food justice: what’s at stake in Paris?
Five key fights at the UNFCCC
The
build-up to the December Paris climate summit is focusing world attention on
the issue of climate change. In the process, there is significant opportunity
to raise and highlight justice issues that lie at the intersection of climate
change and food – for example, the fact that climate change will threaten the
right to food, with the gravest impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable, through
devastating impacts on food production. A second critical issue to highlight is
the central role played by industrial systems of agricultural production in
causing climate change, in particular through massive emissions from industrial
meat production, production and use of synthetic chemical fertilizers, and
large-scale monocultures of commodities shipped around the world.
How
do these issues land within the current battles in the UNFCCC? What are the
most important fights on the road to Paris where food campaigners can engage
and bring a vision for food justice and a different way of producing food? Here
are five key fights:
1. For a temperature goal that protects
the rights to food and water – with actions towards that goal based on equity.
For
food sovereignty, 2°C warming is too much. Already crop yields are
decreasing, and with further increases in temperatures we expect significant
impacts on the right to food, lives, and livelihoods, particularly of the poor
and most vulnerable. To minimize these impacts we need a target to keep temperature
rise as far below 1.5°C as possible; with ambitious, equitable, and fair
sharing of emissions cuts; and accompanied by the means of implementation (climate
finance, technology, capacity building) necessary to meet this target.
Equity
in determining who does what is critical – it means not placing the burden of
emissions reductions on poor countries. Developed countries must assume their fair
share of both emissions reductions
and the finance needed to help other countries decarbonize their energy sectors
and adapt. The sharing of the emissions burden must be based on historical
responsibility, capacity, and repayment of climate debt. A temperature goal
without these additional provisions is likely to put undue burden on developing
countries.
While
language recognizing the right to food and water is not likely to be included
in the text itself, we must judge the Paris outcome based on whether those
rights can be realized – which for much of the world will be very difficult or
impossible at 2°C.
2. For principles and reference to
rights to ensure that mitigation efforts do not compromise access to food –
that is, fighting against carbon markets and landgrabbing UNFCCC-style.
Carbon
markets in trees and soils were only the beginning. The idea that we can use
land and trees to sequester emissions is seductive and viewed by some key
actors as an alternative to emission reductions, or as a way to buy time as we
transform the fossil fuel economy. Markets in soil and trees have not turned
out to be the finance panacea thought by many, but soil and trees are still
seen as the solution to long term temperature rise – through geoengineering.
This is the new face of the old threat – that new land-based mitigation
techniques, such as biochar, bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and
other types of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) geoengineering approaches, as well
as old “solutions” like biofuels, will compete with the use of land to feed
people.
The
agreement will likely contain minimal language referring to carbon markets or
land use. Instead, the relevant text is likely to be simple enabling language which
opens the door for markets and the development of new or revised rules for land
use accounting. Fighting against this type of language in the UNFCCC is
difficult as conversations are obscured in technical decision language to
enable rules to be developed in work programmes that will start in 2016. That
said, these are still live fights.
Campaigners
inside the talks are trying to secure language in the core agreement that can
constrain those rules:
Parties shall, when pursuing actions in the land sector in
addition to actions in other sectors and consistent with all relevant
international obligations, prioritise the protection, maintenance and
restoration of natural ecosystems; undertake emissions reductions and
removals in an equitable manner; and the governing body shall develop
principles and guidelines for ensuring social protections, food security,
ecological integrity, transparency and comparability in relation to such
actions.
To
be clear, this is compromise language. There are a number of NGOs inside the
talks very happy to develop rules for carbon markets. More critical voices are
needed to strengthen this language and to ensure that it can make it into the
final agreement.
3. For a mechanism on loss and damage.
The
slow onset processes of temperature rise, sea level rise, salinization, ocean
acidification, and desertification all pose substantial and ever increasing threats
to future food production and the lives and livelihoods of food producers and
fisherfolk. There are very clear limits to adaptation to these constantly
increasing pressures, leaving those who depend on the land and water with no
options but to find alternate livelihoods, often through migration.
A
loss and damage mechanism that can address these losses must be anchored in the
agreement. A mechanism was established in Warsaw a few years ago (the Warsaw
International Mechanism for Loss and Damage), but developing countries are
looking to anchor that temporary institution into the legal agreement, with the
possibility to strengthen it by expanding its mandate. The mechanism to be
anchored in the Paris agreement must at a minimum be able to: address slow
onset climate impacts beyond adaptation; provide for reparations for permanent
loss and damage; and protect climate migrants. These elements are all
fundamental to protecting the right to food under the climate change regime.
4. For the right kind of climate finance
to the right kinds of projects.
Several
important fights are brewing at the Green Climate Fund (GCF), with developed
countries on one side and developing countries and civil society on the other.
Two of the biggest battles are about who gets to disburse climate finance
(national entities vs. private banks, multilateral development banks, and large
intergovernmental agencies like the FAO) and under what terms (grants vs.
loans). These battles will spill over into the discourse in Paris as frustrations
around an overall lack of climate finance run high.
As
it looks now, monies are more likely to be channeled through multi-lateral
development banks and large intergovernmental agencies like the FAO than
through national entities. Anyone who has been following FAOs leadership of the
“climate-smart” agriculture
agenda should be concerned that climate finance decisions will follow their
priorities rather than those determined at a national scale.
There
is no shortage of support needs for communities to address the impacts of
climate change in agricultural systems, including support for adaptation for
vulnerable regions and transformation to sustainable and resilient food
production systems, built around local food economies. In particular, GCF
monies should be directed towards small-scale community- and ecosystem-based
adaptation projects and away from “climate-smart” agriculture. A number of
civil society organizations are working to define the right kinds of projects for the GCF to fund, which will lead to real and
necessary transformations.
5. Against “climate-smart” solutions in
the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA).
The
Paris outcome will include the legal agreement and accompanying decisions, submission
of intended nationally determined contributions, a finance package, as well as
a random assemblage of voluntary initiatives bundled together under The
Lima-Paris Action Agenda. The initiatives are collected together under themes, one
of which is agriculture. The initiatives will be showcased on specific days
during the COP, with agriculture scheduled for 1 December.
The
FAO and the French government are in charge of the agriculture theme. Given
that pairing, we should expect “climate-smart” agriculture to be prominently
featured. Indeed, the French government has been heavily invested in promoting
“climate-smart” agriculture, including through support of the Global Alliance for
Climate-Smart Agriculture. In addition, Stephane LeFoll, the French agriculture
minister, has a pet research initiative called “4 pour 1000” or “votre carbone
nous interesse” – “your carbon interests us,” which he plans to launch in
Paris. LeFoll claims that if the soil carbon concentration in all the soils
around the world was increased by 0.4% every year it would compensate for the
total yearly carbon emissions from all sources.
Civil
society groups are campaigning to keep “climate-smart” agriculture out of the
LPAA solutions agenda, including with a widely supported sign-on letter calling
on governments “not to endorse Climate Smart Agriculture as
a solution to climate change, nor to label any other initiative that would be
part of the "agenda of solutions" as part of the concept.”
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