Chris Milton : Independent Journalist & Writer

The Ecologist – Africa’s Green Revolution 2.0: rejecting agribusiness, pesticides and GM greenwash

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A revolutionary new initiative in African farming was launched earlier this year as part of the annual International Fair of Animal Resources (FIARA) in Dakar, Senegal. It draws together twelve rural women’s networks from across the west African countries of Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Ghana into a campaign entitled ‘Nous Sommes La Solution! Célébrons l’agriculture familiale’ – ‘We Are The Solution! A celebration of family farming.’

The campaign’s aims include gathering together the best in African farming knowledge and technology, acting as a bulwark against the needless industrialisation of the continent’s agriculture and facilitating the empowerment of women within rural communities.

It will run for three years during which it will focus on building capacity at grass roots level in both traditional agricultural knowledge and the ability of women to shoulder the responsibilities they’ve had to in recent years as effective leaders.

The need for a women-led agricultural campaign in Africa was first discussed during 2007 and plans for a west African organisation were formally laid out during a 2009 meeting of the Network of West African Peasant Producers (ROPPA).

Networks similar to ROPPA have been springing up across Africa recently, creating what Tanya Kerssen, Research Fellow at Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy and a major international supporter of We Are The Solution!, describes as ‘a broad constellation of political alliances that form the growing African food sovereignty movement.’ (more…)

The Ecologist – Sustainable Stock Exchanges : a new choice for investors

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In November 2009, in a small room at the United Nations in New York, a group of the world’s most powerful financiers gathered to discuss something close to their hearts: stock markets.

However rather than talking about capital driven considerations, such as cash flows and profit maximisation, their focus was on promoting environmental and social considerations as criteria for sound investments.

This is because the meeting was hosted by the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) and most of the meeting’s attendees were signatories to the scheme. Its focus was how signatories could fulfil the third of PRI’s six principles: to seek environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure from the companies in which they invest. ESG is the twin of the more widely known Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). While CSR is the disclosure of information by a company, ESG is the criteria against which investment decisions should be made. The two do not correlate exactly, but they certainly work hand in hand. (more…)

The Ecologist – Will the UN’s Codex Alimentarius make food less nutritious?

Imagine this: a Nazi war criminal establishes a secretive organisation embedded within the United Nations through which shadowy corporate interests force countries to remove the nutritional value from food, allowing food companies to profit from spreading malnutrition.

It sounds like fantasy but this is the essence of the accusations that have been levelled at the Codex Alimentarius over the years.  This body, whose Latin name means “Food Rules” is indeed run by the United Nations, but beyond that most of the lurid accusations can be rejected out of hand.

However there are countless organisations and agencies which run under the aegis of the United Nations; what makes this one so special that wild myths and theories circulate so abundantly about its true purpose?

Origins

The Codex Alimentarius was established in 1962 as a joint venture between the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation. Its aim is to establish internationally agreed food standards in order to protect consumers’ health and facilitate the international food trade.

All but a handful of countries in the world are members, who meet in committees to agree on rules and standards.  These standards are adopted by consensus, meaning every country has an opportunity to disagree and block adoption. NGOs are allowed to speak at meetings, but they have no direct influence upon the outcomes.

The standards the Coded Alimentarius produces are purely voluntary in nature and members may adopt them for internal or international use as they see fit. (more…)

Foreign Policy – The Sand Smugglers,Page 1, Page 2

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The causeway linking Singapore to the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula is normally clogged with cars and trucks making the short international journey, but things got particularly bad on Feb. 1, when traffic came to a grinding halt. Thirty-seven trucks were abandoned where they stood on the Malaysian side, just yards away from a customs checkpoint, their drivers having simply walked away. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that they were carrying an illegal substance — but not drugs, illegal migrants, or precious jewels. They were carrying sand.

Singapore’s economy quite literally rests upon maintaining a huge and continuous supply of sand — and smuggling has become a multibillion-dollar trade, driving a huge web of corruption and theft in a country renowned for honest business practices and corporal punishment.

The tiny island nation, one of the 20 smallest states in the world, has enjoyed a phenomenal economic boom since the 1980s. In the space of only 30 years its population has doubled and its GDP has exploded by more than 1,000 percent (making it now the wealthiest country in Asia). Singapore’s economic success is largely based upon the phenomenal growth in its services industry. The country has taken advantage of two factors: its ability to process silicon for use in microchips and electronics, and its positioning as a regional business hub within Asia, connecting industrial leaders and business executives from across the continent.

But the boom times have come at a cost. The country has, quite literally, run out of space. Since Singapore’s independence in the 1960s, its land area has grown from 581.5 to 710 square kilometers. By 2030, the country plans to expand by another 70 square kilometers. That would see Singapore’s land area grow 30 percent from its original size, giving it the same area as New York City. (more…)

The Ecologist — Somalia used as toxic dumping ground

The pirates of Somalia became bandits of international notoriety during 2008, hijacking ever more prolific targets, including arms ships, oil tankers and cruise liners, and extracting huge ransoms from their owners.

National governments and NGOs decried their actions as an affront to international maritime law, but few examined the pirates’ claim that a far greater crime continues in Somalia: the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

For more than 10 years, environmental and human rights organisations have called on the international community to act to stop this dumping, but successive wars have ensured the crisis has only deepened. Now, as Ethiopian troops withdraw from Somalia and the piracy becomes more subdued, there is hope the issue can be properly investigated and resolved.

In 1997, in the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Greenpeace published a landmark investigation into the dumping, which showed that it started in the late 1980s, and exposed Swiss and Italian companies as brokers for the transportation of hazardous waste from Europe to dumps in Somalia. Subsequent research has also shown that the company employed physically to ship the waste was wholly owned by the Somali government.

When Somalia slipped into civil war in 1992, the waste exporters had to negotiate with local clan warlords, who demanded guns and ammunition to allow the dumping to continue. Many of the ships, having brought weapons or waste, then became trawlers, and left Somali waters with holds full of tuna for onward sale.

An investigation into the murder of the Italian journalist Ilaria Alpi in Somalia in 1994 quotes the warlord Boqor Musa as saying, ‘It is evident those ships carried military equipment for different factions involved in the civil war’, and it is widely believed that Alpi was assassinated because she had incontrovertible evidence of the guns-for-waste trade.

The Greenpeace report briefly made the news and was followed up by the European Green Party tabling a question in the European Parliament about ‘the dumping of toxic waste from German, French and Italian nuclear power plants and hospitals’ in Somalia.

It also prompted a large investigation in Italy, a former colonial power in Somalia. This concluded that around 35 million tonnes of waste had been exported to Somalia for only $6.6 billion, leading the environmental group Legambiente to assert Somalia’s inland waste dumps are ‘among the largest in the world’.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 served to reinvigorate interest in the continued dumping of hazardous waste in Somalia. Rusting tanks of unidentifiable ooze were washed up on to beaches; villagers began to die of unexplained illnesses and coastal ecosystems collapsed.

In 2005, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) concluded its own on-the-ground investigation in Somalia. Despite being stymied by local political interests and finding no tangible proof, it concluded that the ‘dumping of toxic and harmful waste is rampant in the sea, on the shores and in the hinterland’.

A year later the Somali multi-clan NGO Daryeel Bulsho Guud conducted its own survey. With greater local co-operation, it was able to identify 15 containers of ‘confirmed nuclear and chemical wastes’ in eight coastal areas.

At the same time, the UN and World Bank put together a Joint Needs Assessment (JNA) to plan for Somalia’s return to functioning nationhood. Updated in 2008, it recommends $42.1 million be set aside for environmental activities, including ensuring all ‘toxic waste [is] found and removed’. It doesn’t address the cost of human suffering, however, and ignores the fact that the dumping of toxic waste in Somalia continues to this day.

Field research in Somalia by Zainab Hassan, a former fellow at the University of Minnesota and Environmental Justice Advocate, has brought to light a whole range of chronic and acute illnesses suffered by Somalis.

These include severe birth defects, such as the absence of limbs, and widespread cancers. One local doctor said he had treated more cases of cancer in one year than he had in his entire professional career before the tsunami.

‘Firms are illegally dumping hazardous and nuclear waste,’ says Zainab Hassan. ‘The international community should do something in terms of cleaning up, and those responsible should be brought to justice.’

EcoTerra, an NGO with strong connections within Somalia, agrees, though it refuses to name the companies involved or their countries of origin. Possibly with one eye upon the assassination of Ilaria Alpi, it describes the situation as ‘deadly’.

The UN’s Special Representative for the region, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, is similarly sensitive. He confi rms that dumping continues on the Somali coast, likening the situation to the shipping of blood diamonds from Liberia and Sierra Leone. His office refuses to name which NGOs he’s asked to investigate the issue, however, presumably for their own protection, or the companies suspected of being involved.

Bringing those responsible for the dumping to justice may be hard. Under EU regulations 259/93 and 92/3/Euratom, the originating country is responsible for disposing of its medical and nuclear waste, as well as for its retrieval if it is disposed of illegally.

With many of the containers unmarked and much of the paperwork probably long since lost or destroyed, however, it will take a lot to enable any legal action to take place.

In addition, a UNDP source described the search for hazardous material in Somalia as like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not that they don’t know it’s there, he says, but that they don’t know where to start looking for it.

This makes it all the more urgent that stability return to the country. Only then will the dumping stop and the clean-up commence.