Contemporary contradictions of the global development project: Geopolitics, global ecology and the 'development climate'

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 247-262

  McMichael, Philip ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPMENT PROJECT; GEOPOLITICS; POWER RELATIONS;

EID: 59049107630     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590802622987     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. Cited in JT Roberts & BC Parks, A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, p 25.
2. W Sachs, 'Global ecology and the shadow of "development"', in Sachs (ed), Global Ecology, London: Zed Books, 1993, p 20.
3. B Southworth, 'Priorities for decision makers: Tackling climate change in a time of corporate globalization', Globalizations, 5 (1), 2008, pp 72-75.
4. Roberts and Parks break this down as follows: 'Twenty percent of the world's population in the high-income countries is responsible for 63 percent of global emissions, while the bottom 20 percent of the world's people releases only 3 percent ... According to our calculations, the average US citizen dumps as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as nine Chinese citizens, eighteen citizens of India, and ninety Bangladeshis. But even more startling is that each US citizen on average pollutes as much as over five hundred citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Zaire, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia, and Burundi'. Roberts & Parks, A Climate of Injustice, p 146.
5. Cf D Da Costa & P McMichael, 'The poverty of the global order', Globalizations, 4 (4), 2007, pp 593 607.
6. However, in addition to Agenda 21, arising from the Rio Summit of 1992, which 'became a casualty of the negotiating process' between global North and South, there is an evident repeat from the G- meeting at Gleneagles in 2005. RL Hicks, BC Parks, JT Roberts & MJ Tierney, Greening Aid? Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp 2-4, 259.
7. For example, the Darfur con.ict is widely recognised as the first climate war, flooding in the Sundabans is on the rise, and now we have the 'food crisis' in part as a consequence of the rush to agrofuels.
8. UNDP, Human Development Report 2007/2008, New York: United Nations, 2008, p 7.
9. Quoted in S Hug, H Reid & LA Murray, Climate Change and Development Link, International Institute for Environment and Development, Series 123, 2006, available at www.iied.org.
10. Cf L Lohmann, 'Carbon trading, climate justice and the production of ignorance: Ten examples', Development, 51 (3), 2008, pp 359-365
11. and ActionAid, 'We know what we need: South Asian women speak out on climate change adaptation', Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2007.
12. Cf N Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.
13. A Payne, The Global Politics of Unequal Development, London: Palgrave, 2005, p 217.
14. A Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, p 308.
15. Roberts & Parks, A Climate of Injustice, p 14.
16. Ibid, pp 23, 36.
17. Quoted in J Yardley, 'China says rich countries should take lead on global warming', New York Times, 7 February 2007, A9.
18. Roberts & Parks, A Climate of Injustice, p 38.
19. Ibid, p 169.
20. Ibid, p 175
21. Ibid, p 239.
22. J Rapley, Understanding Development: Theory and Practice in the Third World, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007, p 224.
23. T Banuri & H Opschoor, 'Climate change and sustainable development', DESA Working Paper, 56, 2007, pp 1, 7, 9, at www.un.org/esa/desa/ papers. Emphasis in original.
24. Ibid, p 8.
25. What those solutions are is not developed, but note that the Environmental Kuznets Curve, based on observations that economic growth reduces environmental degradation, is a likely fabrication of the methodological individualism of country-centred measures, which precisely ignore the 'ecological footprint' of the CDM.
26. Banuri & Opschoor, 'Climate change and sustainable development', p 12.
27. Ibid, p 18.
28. Ibid, p 21.
29. Ibid, p 20.
30. R Klein, T Banuri, S Kartha & L Schipper, 'International climate policy', Commission on Climate Change and Development, March 2008, p 2, available at www.ccdcommission.org.
31. J Schaar, 'Overview of adaptation mainstreaming initiatives', Commission on Climate Change and Development, March 2008, p 1, available at www.ccdcommission.org.
32. As reported by ROPA at the Terra Preta Forum, Rome, 1-5 June 2008.
33. ETC Group, 'Patenting the "climate genes'" ... and capturing the climate agenda', ETC Group Communique', Issue 99, 2008, at www.etcgroup.org.
34. See, for example, Action Aid, 'We know what we need'; K Lobe, A Green Revolution of Africa: Hope for Hungry Farmers?, Winnipeg, MB: Canadian Foodgrains Bank, 2007
35. and Community Media Trust, PV Satheesh & M Pimbert (eds), Arming Life and Diversity: Rural Images and Voices on Food Sovereignty in South India, London: IIED Publications, 2008.
36. Quoted in R Weiss, 'Firms seek patents on "climate ready"' altered crops', Washington Post, 13May 2008, A4.
37. The adaptation fund, devised in the Marrakech Accords, is to be financed with a 2% levy on the application of the Clean Development Mechanism. Hicks et al, Greening Aid?, p 259.
38. Ibid, p 4.
39. Ibid, p 259.
40. J Vidal, 'Billions wasted on UN climate programme', Guardian Weekly 30 May--5 June 2008, p 1.
41. W Sachs, 'The discovery of poverty', New Internationalist, 232, at www.newint.org/issue232.
42. UNDP, Human Development Report 2007/2008, pp 13, 16, 21, 24, 27.
43. Sachs, Global Ecology, p xvi.
44. Ibid, p 13.
45. For a brilliant critique of the construction of markets that use the earth's carbon-cycling capacity as a commodity, see L Lohmann, 'Carbon trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power', Development Dialogue, 48, 2006, pp 1-359.
46. 'Agro-fuels' reminds us of the agricultural dimensions of what are conventionally termed 'biofuels', as if such fuels represented life, as opposed to competition for scarce crop land, forests, etc.
47. G Monbiot, 'The last straw', Guardian, 12 February 2008.
48. E Holt-Gimeńez & I Keneld, 'When "renewable isn't sustainable": agrofuels and the inconvenient truths behind the 2007 US Energy Independence and Security Act', Policy Brief No 13, Oakland, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 2008, p 3.
49. J Fargione, J Hill, D Tilman, S Polasky & P Hawthorne, 'Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt', Science, 7 February 2008, p 1.
50. Transnational Institute (TNI), Agrofuels: Towards a Reality Check in Nine Key Areas, Amsterdam: TNI, June 2007.
51. Greenpeace, 'How the palm oil industry is cooking the climate', 2007, at www.greenpeace.org.
52. A Rheeney, 'Controversial oil palm project abandoned in PNG', Pacific Magazine, 17 January 2008.
53. TNI, Agrofuels, p 10.
54. Cf JB Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
55. J Moore, 'Environmental crises and the metabolic rift in world-historical perspective', Organization & Environment, 13 (2), 2000, pp 123-158.
56. C Duncan, The Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996, p 123.
57. Ibid, p 122.
58. R Walker, The Conquest of Bread: A Hundred and Fifty Years of Agribusiness in California, New York: New Press, 2004.
59. J Pretty et al, 'Resource conserving agriculture increases yields in developing countries', Environmental Science & Technology, 40 (4), 2006
60. Pretty in E Goldsmith, 'Feeding the world under climate change', Institute of Science in Society, June, 2007
61. and SI Apfelbaum & J Kimble, 'A dirty, more natural way to light climate change', Ithaca Journal, 6 December 2007, p 9.
62. A Beattie, 'Seeds of change: Africa seeks to engineer an agricultural revolution', Financial Times, 3 June 2008, p 11.
63. R Patel, Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee: 'Contributing factors and international responses to the global food crisis', US Congress, 14 May 2008.
64. GRAIN, Agrofuels special issue of Seedling, July 2007, p 7.
65. AJ McMichael, JW Powles, CD Butler & R Uauy, 'Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health', Lancet, 13 September 2007.
66. Cf FAO, Livestock's Long Shadow, Rome: FAO, 2007.
67. D Nepstad, 'Diet for a hot planet', Boston Globe, 22 November 2006, p 1, at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/ articles/2006/11/22/diet_for_a_hot_planet/
68. Quoted in T Weiss, The Global Food Economy, London: Zed, 2007, p 20.
69. T Lang & M Heasman, Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets, London: Earthscan, 2004, p 248.
70. Interestingly, pastoral production of livestock, upon which almost a billion rural poor depend, accounts for the largest share of GHG from the livestock sector, roughly two-thirds. McMichael et al, 'Food, livestock production, energy, climate change and health'. While 70% of livestock production is intensive, and the 'livestock revolution' includes related trends - from ruminants (cattle, sheep) to monogastrics (poultry, hogs), feed roughages to concentrates, smallholders to industrial production, all ever more concentrated - the FAO identi.es a dilemma: That such trends, while reducing GHG emissions (net of the feedbase), discriminate against the rural poor for whom livestock is a last resort as a livelihood strategy. H Steinfeld, 'Livestock's long shadow', Seminar to Department of Animal Science, Cornell University, 4 March 2008. Pursuit of a climatic solution in 'clustering' intensive livestocking is complicated by unequal social, and cultural, outcomes - not to mention the problem of the carbon debt and entropy of intensive water use of its feed base.
71. McMichael et al, 'Food, livestock production, energy, climate change and health'.
72. Ibid, p 55.
73. Fargione et al, 'Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt'.
74. P McMichael, 'A food regime analysis of neo-liberalism's food crisis', Agriculture and Human Values, forthcoming.
75. Cf R Connell, 'The Northern theory of globalization', Sociological Theory, 25 (4), 2007, pp 368-385.
76. Cf Roberts & Parks, A Climate of Injustice.
77. WW Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
78. See Lohmann, 'Carbon trading, climate justice and the production of ignorance'.
79. Lohmann, 'Carbon trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power', p 345.
80. L Lohmann, 'Resisting green globalism', in Sachs, Global Ecology, p 158.
81. Lohmann, 'Carbon trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power', p 347. 76 This is not simply a populist tract - it derives from recognition of, and involvement with, resistance movements that are politically mobilised within the relations, but reject the terms, of subjection of the corporate empire.
82. See P McMichael, 'Peasants make their own history, but not just as they please...', Journal of Agrarian Change, 8 (2-3), 2008, pp 205-228
83. and J Beverly, 'Subaltern resistance in Latin America: A reply to Tom Brass', Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 2004, pp 261-275.
84. J Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002, p 150.