Connect the Dots: Climate, Energy and Farming

Three big pieces of legislation are pending in Congress and the well-being of the entire planet is dependent upon them. Through the Energy Bill, the Climate Bill and the Farm Bill, America is legislating for the whole world, even though the political calculus is largely defined inside the Beltway by narrow special interests and big campaign contributors.

That's why it's worth giving some air time to a protest farming leaders staged yesterday -- not in the Capital Rotunda or the mall in Washington, no, nor in North Dakota or Iowa, not there either, but at the Bali Tourism Development Center Food Court, down the road from the convention center where international climate talks are progressing.

Dozens of people wearing green headscarves, accompanied by musicians playing percussion, chanted their opposition to neo-colonialism.

The group planned to march to the Westin Resort where the Convention Center is located. However, the rally did not move beyond the BTDC food court grounds as lines of police guarding the entrance gate, blocked their route.

Awfully peripheral to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. But then again, connect the dots, and what the protesters in Bali from La Via Campesina had to say might be much more important than meets the eye.

La Via Campesina hasn't exactly busted through the US media clutter, even though it's an international coalition of more than 100 peasant organizations which advocate family-farm-based sustainable agriculture. It was the group that coined the term food sovereignty -- the right to produce food on one's own territory. And here's their beef with global warming and the solutions that are on the table in Bali.

• corporate food production and consumption are significantly contributing to global warming and the destruction of communities.
• international food transport, intensive monoculture plant production, land and forest destruction and the use of chemical inputs in
  agriculture make the sector into an energy consumer.
• the solutions proposed during the Bali talks, such as the alternative use of plant-derived fuels and carbon trading, was not
  addressing the real problems of climate change, instead they are opening up new international business ventures

La Via Campesina’s international coordinator, Henry Saragih:

Promoting agrofuel or biofuel as they call it, is not the answer as it only causes a world dependent on food to use food as fuel. In Indonesia alone we see how palm oil for cooking oil is being exported for agro-fuel and in Brazil, sugar is being used for ethanol.

He also said that carbon trading is the privatization of carbon and allows governments to allocate permits to big industries so they could trade “rights to pollute” among themselves.

Joao Palate from Mozambique:

The governments are here to do business. They are here to think of how they can benefit or make money out of climate change.

That's a perspective you don't often hear. But it's echo was on the op-ed page of yesterday's Washington Post, with Jimmy Carter giving voice to the way in which pending US farm law creates a "harvest of misery" in the parts of the world which La Via Campesina represents.

American farmers are not dependent on the global market because they are guaranteed a minimum selling price by the federal government. American producers of cotton received more than $18 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2005, while market value of the cotton was $23 billion. That's a subsidy of 86 percent!

Overproduction in the United States leads to the dumping of U.S. cotton on global markets, which drives prices down. In recent years,
cotton exported from the United States has been sold 61 percent below its cost of production. Fragile African economies that depend on agricultural exports, especially cotton, are sometimes devastated by these practices.

Carter then goes on to support two proposed amendments to the farm bill that would fix what's wrong with US farm subsidies.

Both amendments would go a long way toward making the farm bill fair for farmers at home and abroad.

Farm Bill, meet La Via Campesina, the climate negotiations in Bali, the Climate Bill, and the Energy Bill.

Time to connect the dots on the global legislation before Congress. 

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