ISIS Press Release 27/09/05
Food and Energy Security: Local Systems Global Solidarity
Alan Simpson MP offers a brilliant analysis of what’s wrong with current
national and international policies on food and energy and why we must break
all the rules
The new political divide
It’s the strange nature of our times that’s
defining a quite different politics. The defining difference now is between
those who want to address, with a degree of urgency, the challenges
of climate change and the way it is going to rewrite all of the rules that
will determine how we live our lives, and those who don’t.
And that doesn’t cut easily
on party lines. We have exactly the same divisions in pretty much all of
the parties at the moment; and that requires us to be willing to look at a
number of heresies. I wanted to explore some of those heresies, partly to
challenge, but also to excite. What I want to put to you is that this is a time when we ought to be openly advocating
the case for breaking all the rules, because the current rules don’t work;
they are taking us deeper into an accelerating crises, and breaking the rules
is a sensible way of saving lives. I think we ought to be giving platforms
to that degree of irreverence.
Breaking old rules for new
So the alternative to today’s Washington consensus neo-liberal
agenda of global free trade is a different basis on which way the world works,
and that for me would have to be global rules base for essentially localised
sustainability systems.
It is not to turn our backs
on internationalism, but to understand that today and tomorrow’s internationalism is one of connectedness, of solidarity
(that was term that the Archbishop of Canterbury used), the solidarity of
witness and a different form of “gift relationship”, as I shall explain later.
What we have
to be looking for would include a rules base that enshrines the right to produce
to meet your own security needs before accepting the need to produce to meet
anyone else’s needs. It would include a right to hold essential resources
in public ownership rather than see them carved up for private gain. There
has to be a shift in the way in which we use our fiscal resources for subsidies
that promote sustainability. In other words, it is not
the eradication of subsidies or the existence of subsidies that’s the problem;
it’s the current use of subsides to distort and destroy the ecology that we
depend upon for tomorrow.
Included within that global
rules base must be an absolute, absolute
rejection of patents on food. We have to take that out, and the
quid pro quo that goes along with that is
to establish the universal farmers rights to save seeds. And then the issues
that emerge would be about how we feed the world rather than who owns the
food chain. We then have to go on to look internationally at the case for
global eco-taxes. There is a need to replace
the WTO with a different global organisation, one that’s focussed on a sustainable
global ecology.
And that would be the interconnectness
of a global framework within which we may have the prospects of survival.
Triple crises and their origins
There are three interconnected crises facing us now: the crisis in water
security, the crisis in energy security, and the crisis in food security
Mae-Wan Ho said that global
food production has been declining over the last four years. But we need
to connect those to some of the other pressures that we face in every part
of today’s global economy. It terms of water, within the 20th
Century, global water consumption increased six fold – twice the rate of population
growth. There’s a fair majority of people who will expect, within reasonable
circumstances, to still be alive in 2025. Many will have children of their
own by 2025 that they don’t have now. But the figures for global water crises
suggest that by 2025, in twenty years time, the proportion of people on the
planet who will be living in areas of “significant water stress” will rise
from 34 percent to 63 percent. In absolute numbers it’s a total sum of about
six billion people, which is the entirety of today’s world population. So
we cannot go on using those water resources in the profligate way we have
been doing. Water uses tie in to a different form of ecological auditing.
Huge amounts of the water resources
have gone into agribusiness, the business of overproduction from the land,
in order to produce food surpluses in the industrial world that are then dumped
on the developing world in order to undermine the sustainable agricultural
base that they themselves ought to be able to rely on. So we are squandering
water in order to destroy the viable economies of both the North and South.
The same is true in relation
to energy. If we were to do an energy audit of where we are now, what we
would find is that within our own country, we know that in today’s power stations,
70 percent of the energy is
dissipated as waste. We pump huge amounts of water back into the atmosphere
through cooling towers in order to just generate the energy that we have.
Globally
we have a massive misuse of subsidies. Subsidies in the wrong direction that
have gone primarily into sustaining the production of coal, oil and gas.
£235 billion a year globally is going into the energy subsidies and into energy
systems that actually accelerate the crises.
So it isn’t that we’re short
of money, we have huge resources of money, but we are using them to accelerate
the crisis rather than the reverse it. And I’m genuinely excited about the
possibilities of reversing it.
The Woking miracle
I have to confess that I never, ever in my life thought that I would say
that a revolution of any sort
would have begun in Woking! I’m sorry if anyone reading this is
from Woking. It just has never been a place that’s stirred my loins, in thinking
that’s where revolutions could happen, but it has! And within the next couple
of years Woking will be going off the National grid because it generates more
energy than it needs. It is currently generating 135 percent of its energy
needs from renewable and sustainable sources. They include hydrogen fuel
cell technology, which also happens, to provide a by-product of pure water.
Something like one hundred thousand gallons of pure water a year as a by-product.
And this is going back into the depleted water resources, back into the local
economy.
What Woking also discovered
is that not only are our national power stations massively inefficient in
the way they work, but that the national grid is massively inefficient. For
every pound’s worth of electricity that Woking was putting into the grid,
it was costing them pretty much £20 to get it back because of a whole series
of leaks in the generation system, the distribution system and various taxes
at different stages. So they found that it was much better for them to have
bought and installed the wiring system for the whole of Woking. They have
reclaimed the ownership of their
local energy system and they invite people to sign up to energy services
contracts, not energy consumption contracts, but energy services contracts in which some of you are actually
are having solar roofs installed as part of the contract because the system
generates wealth as well as generating warmth and well-being. They have cut
the energy costs to the fuel-poor. This government’s target is 10 percent
of income. Woking have cut them to 6 percent of the income of the poor and
this has all been done and it’s not just on a local scale, somewhere tucked
away beyond some serious consideration.
National governments have lost the plot
What’s happening now in London is that London did a global search of whom
to appoint as their climate change co-ordinator and they pinched the guy from
Woking. His remit is to make London energy self sufficient within a decade.
Now that is not messing around, this is a really serious consensus of how
we can generate our energy needs from and with renewable sources within a
decade without destroying the prospects for the future. And not content with
doing that, London is already in discussions
with twenty-five other global cities that are saying, actually we’re giving
up on national governments because they’ve lost the plot. We’re going
to do it ourselves. We will try and have this as a globilized initiative in
which we share the resources of our know-how on a “gift relationship” basis
so that we can all survive.
So the scale upon which
this can take place is awesome if only we are to understand it and to engage it. The only people who don’t
want to do that by and large are the majority who are occupants of this place
(the House of Commons) but there are honourable exceptions and
I say those exceptions are across different parties. But the momentum for that change will come, and is already
coming from outside, and that is phenomenally exciting, absolutely
astonishing. So that’s where, I think, we need to be heading, and I’ll just
point out that neither Woking nor London nor
any of the other global cities who are in this, none of them are making an
assumption that there is a single part of the energy components that will
be nuclear. So all of this can go and run in a quite different way.
And it ties in to the food agenda.
The slow food movement
I went to a fascinating conference last November in Turin. It was convened
by the Italian slow food movement,
which had brought together five thousand representatives of food communities
in 132 different countries, many of whom didn’t have passports; they didn’t
even have ID documents. But they were looking at how they could
share their knowledge of sustainable food production in ways that offered
common ground for long term viable futures. And I have to say that in some
ways the most exciting of the discussions was one between farmers from Afghanistan
and Columbia who were talking
not about problems of drugs production, but about the production of raisins
in Afghanistan and savannah fruits in Columbia as a basis of
earning a living, feeding their families, producing goods that other people
needed that were non-destructive
of other peoples futures. Now all of this was going on in defiance of the
WTO negotiations, and I think we have to come out here as advocates
of that defiance.
I suggest we
can tie our ropes together in a different way from the one that is being driven
through the WTO. I said this to those who are part of the Make Poverty History
campaign, that if we genuinely believe that all that’s needed is to free the
Southern Hemisphere to get into more genuinely free trade competition with
the North, and then remove the barriers, you ought to look at some of the
work that people like Caroline Lucas has done about the ecological
consequences of large distance goods distribution and the sheer volume of
fossil fuels that are consumed in the process of shipping goods from one side
of the planet to the other.
The new “gift relationship”
What really hacks me off is that we are now
a net importer in this country of parsnips. And I say that as someone, who,
as a child, bore a grudge against my father for the one thing he was good at, which was producing
endless supplies of sodding parsnips. The notion that Britain has to be a
net importer of parsnips just seemed to me to be completely barking mad. But what we can
do is to touch base with sustainability, the notion of taking out and putting
back into the land in ways that conserve and hand on. And this is the point
I want to finish on, the gift relationship.
As a child and
then as a student, I grew up with a very specific understanding
of what the gift relationship
was. A sociologist called Richard Titmuss defined it, and it was enshrined
in the blood transfusion service in the UK, one of the most wonderful gifts
to any generation that Britain could have come up with. The beauty of the
blood transfusion service is that when you go in and you fill
in the form and you have your thumb tested and you give your donation, no
one lying on the beds ever says “Can you tell me how much I’ve got in my account?
What’s the rate of interest? Is it a high risk account?
We never assume that we
are making those contributions into our own personal, private accounts. We
do so as a gift to others in the assumption that if anything happens to ourselves,
to our children, to our neighbours, there will always be enough in that common
pot to meet our crises needs. And so no money changes hands, no interest
ever gets paid. It is a gift of solidarity from one person to another, from
one generation to another. And that is what has to underpin the thinking
of an international symbol of survival for us through the 21st
century.
The problem in the developing
world is the affordability of being part of an ecological agenda. China is
saying that within a decade they’re promising to increase the rate of car
ownership such that every family with one child will have a car. It will raise
their car ownership from 33 per thousand to 333 per thousand. Multiply that
by the numbers of families in China and you have an increase in car production
and car emissions that will threaten to act as an ecological tsunami to virtually
all other emissions gains that the world seeks to make. In order to do this
they’re trying to increase their production base and the energy requirements
needed to sustain it and that is based at the moment on a commitment in China
to build 500 new coal power stations. Now this is dragging everyone in directions
that will be disastrous. But if they’re not going to do that they have to
pick up the demands that were first made when I first got into this House
by the then Chinese environment minister. She came here are a time when we
were starting to talk about our national commitment to remove or replace the
ozone damaging fridges containing CFCs and HFCs and replace them with non-ozone
damaging fridges. She listens to this and said this is fascinating, within
a decade you’ll probably do it, you’ll probably remove maybe 20 million ozone-damaging
fridges and replace them with 20 million non-damaging fridges and that’s great.
But in the same decade in India, Indian families will assume the right to
acquire fridges themselves. There will be 200 million fridges acquired in
India during the same period. Now history tells us that the fridges in India
will be all the craft technology you’ve banned or abandoned and dumped on
us as aid in bilateral agreements that “gift” us poisonous development.
Indian families have no
desire to poison the environment. What they want is the same ecologically
responsible programme as you. If that’s the case the Indian family that aspires
to have a fridge has to be able to afford a non-contaminating fridge and that
means you have to gift the technology, you have to gift it. If the quid pro quo is that we agree in return not
to overload the basis of your own economy by just dumping our capacity to
produce things in vast quantities on your society then fine, have that as
a protectionist barrier. But allows us to be part of an agenda that reaps
legitimate aspirations of our own families without destroying the aspirations
and survival prospects of yours. So that is where I think the gift relationship
will come in. None of it is deliverable within a free trade agenda. I think
we have to find a way to be willing to stand up and say that. The advisors
around Downing Street fail to hear this. They insist that there is a separate
agenda, I think largely driven by Washington that they still have a remit
to deliver on. It is why coming back to the food issue that as a society
we may have rejected the right of the producers of GM crops to be able to
dump them into our food supply chain.
But at the European level,
every time there is a crop approval permission that is sought the UK has voted
to approve every one despite the fact that as a society we have rejected them
and despite the fact that at a European level other countries have sought
to protect themselves and us by asserting the right to a national veto. Britain alone is pushing the case for the removal of
a right to national vetoes to refuse to endorse GM crops. So this mandate hasn’t come from Parliament. Peter
(Ainsworth MP) and I haven’t been asked about this, the public hadn’t been
asked about this. It has come from a set of corporate lobbyists who have
freewheeling agreements to go into Downing Street and to write the ministerial
script. And that’s why I think that the challenge that has to come
is a reclaiming of the agenda, away from that sense of corporate greed in
the short terms and in favour of something that will allow us all to survive
in the long term.
This article is from a transcript of Alan Simpson’s speech
at the Sustainable World International Conference 14-15 July 2005 in UK Parliament,
Westminster, London (transcribed by Sam Burcher, edited by Mae-Wan Ho).
Sponsor our
Sustainable World Global Initiative here: http://www.indsp.org/SustainableWorldInitiative.php
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