Inequality on the Impact of Climate Change

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Everywhere we turn, the issues and impacts of climate change confront us. One of the most serious environmental threats facing the world today, climate change has moved from the minds of scientists and offices of environmentalists to the mainstream. Though the media is dominated by images of polar bears, melting glaciers, flooded lands, and arid desserts, there is a human face to this story as well. Climate change is not only an issue of the environment; it is also an issue of justice and human rights, one that intersects race and class. All over the world people of color, Indigenous Peoples and low-income communities bear disproportionate burdens from climate change itself, from ill-designed policies to prevent it, and from side effects of the energy systems that cause it.

According to many studies conducted by different environmental organizations around the world, there is a fairly direct relationship between income level of various classes of people and the amount of harmful carbon emissions they produced. The higher the income of a family, the more likely it is to produce a significant amount of carbon gasses. And since poorer classes of people are disproportionately concentrated at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, on the average they are producing less of the harmful carbon emissions.

In the global scale, a major roadblock to establishing international standards is the fact that world leaders don’t yet have a clear answer to the question of fairness, that is, the question of “how much should participating countries ask of developing countries as they attempt to deal with global warming?” The simple fact on the global stage is simply that developing countries, regardless of their level of development, are considerably less responsible for the volume of harmful carbon emissions than the large industrialized nations.

If developed industrialized countries are disproportionately responsible for the level of harmful carbon emissions, is it fair to ask poor developing countries, and those disenfranchised minorities around the world to curb their activity on a level similar to rich developed countries?

The poor, you always have with you... [Mrk14:7]

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

World Hunger and Poverty
by Anup Shah
Global Issues

We often hear about people’s desire to solve world hunger, or to be able to feed the world and help alleviate the suffering associated with it.

However, meaningful long-term alleviation to hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger. World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would still remain. And so while continuous effort, resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger through these technical measures, the political causes require political solutions as well.

Solving World Hunger Means Solving World Poverty

A common, often altruistic, theme amongst many is to be able to solve world hunger via some method that may produce more food. However, often missed is the relationship between poverty and hunger. Hunger is an effect of poverty and poverty is largely a political issue. (While manifesting itself as an economic issue, conditions causing poverty are political and end up being economic.)

As shown in the Genetically Engineered Food and Human Population sections on this web site, people are hungry not due to lack of availability of food, but because people do not have the ability to purchase food and because distribution of food is not equitable. In addition, there is also a lot of politics influencing how food is produced, who it is produced by (and who benefits), and for what purposes the food is produced (such as exporting rather than for the hungry, feedstuff, etc.)

"Access to food and other resources is not a matter of availability, but rather of ability to pay. Put bluntly, those with the most money command the most resources, whilst those with little or no money go hungry. This inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of humanity arguably have too much and other sections little or nothing. Indeed, globally the richest 20 per cent of humanity controls around 85 per cent of all wealth, whilst the poorest 20 per cent control only 1.5 per cent." -- Ross Copeland, The Politics of Hunger, September 2000

Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, quoted at the top of this page, highlights some of the wider issues around hunger. He argues that it is not just a challenge of producing more and more food, but there are many political and economic issues underscoring the problems:

"Research carried out by our Institute reveals that since 1996, governments have presided over a set of policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small and family farmers, and farm cooperatives in nations both North and South. These policies have included runaway trade liberalization, pitting family farmers in the Third World against the subsidized corporate farms in the North (witness the recent U.S. Farm Bill), forcing Third World countries to eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatization of credit, the excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of crop genetic resources by corporations who charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agroecology." -- Peter Rosset, The World Food Summit: What Went Wrong?, June 4, 2002

Click here to read full text.

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And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. And you shall not glean your vineyard, neither shall you gather the fallen fruits of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10)

There are those who scatter, and yet increase even more. There are those who withhold more than is appropriate, but gain poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat. He who waters shall be watered also himself. People curse those who withhold grain, but blessing will be on the head of them who release it. (Proverbs 11:24-26)

Attitude check: Unless affected, why bother?

What about the Filipinos? Piracy focus seen as hypocritical
By Daniel Wallis
Reuters UK

MOMBASA, Kenya (Reuters) - The international community is showing hypocrisy by suddenly focussing on Somali piracy because of the capture of one American, a regional maritime group said on Saturday.

Sea gangs from the lawless Horn of Africa nation grabbed world headlines this week when they briefly hijacked the U.S. freighter Maersk Alabama. Its 20 crew retook control, but the gunmen took captain Richard Phillips hostage on a lifeboat.

The global media has tracked in great detail each twist and turn of the drama as it unfolds, including a failed attempt to swim to safety by the former Boston taxi driver.

But Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme said it was a pity similar attention was not paid to the nearly 250 other hostages -- all from poorer nations -- currently being held by other Somali pirates.

The biggest nationality represented, at 92, is Filipino.

"The media and the international community at large is just demonstrating its hypocrisy," he said in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, where the 17,000-tonne Alabama was due on Saturday.

"Journalists have flooded here from all over the world because of one American captain. What about all the others, from Bangladesh, from Pakistan, from the Philippines, some of whom have been held now for months?" [...]

Click here to read full text.

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Postscript from my old post on 10/20/2008.

"When the rich are significantly affected, the world begins to panic. But when the poor are dying, the world pretends to be as is."

"Most of the world won't change until they themselves would experience for a considerable period of time a significant proportion of what the rest of the world are fully experiencing for a lifetime."

See also my old post on 9/30/2008 concerning this piracy.