This animation of a recent David Harvey speech on the underlying cause of the current global economic crisis is fantastic. I wish I could insert it into my PhD thesis.
Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Thursday, 3 January 2008
Peak Oil?
Looks like it's all happening. Oil hit US$100 a barrel last night for the first time in the history of the trade.
I read Sonia Shah's Crude: The Story of Oil over the xmas/new year break and while it was a little light on it really illuminated the insidiousness of the industry for me.
You can preview exercpts on Amazon and actually watch the associated documentary on the ABC website. We've got it sitting on the hard drive at home (from when the ABC showed it about 6 months ago). C has watched it but I haven't gotten to it yet. The first 5 minutes looked pretty good though, and perhaps better than the book.
I read Sonia Shah's Crude: The Story of Oil over the xmas/new year break and while it was a little light on it really illuminated the insidiousness of the industry for me.
You can preview exercpts on Amazon and actually watch the associated documentary on the ABC website. We've got it sitting on the hard drive at home (from when the ABC showed it about 6 months ago). C has watched it but I haven't gotten to it yet. The first 5 minutes looked pretty good though, and perhaps better than the book.
Thursday, 29 November 2007
To every season
When I was about 6 years old I wanted to grow a flower garden from seeds and I went to the garden shop to buy some with my mother. My mother explained to me that many of the seeds would only last a season and would have to be purchased again the following year. She told me that this was not a natural thing, but rather something that had been purposefully bred into the plants so that a small number of companies could profit from their sale and that now thousands of varieties of flowers no longer existed.
I was shocked. I couldn't believe that such a terrible crime had been committed and that nothing was being done about it. I thought that people should be marching in the street at such a deliberate destruction of flowers.
Well I didn't know the half of it.
Of course this same kind of cynical breeding has been going on with all of our plants - most particularly with our grains, fruits and vegetables - and now it is being done with GM technology. The most insidious example of this is, of course, the Terminator Gene, but essentially the plants that we rely on for food have been deliberately bred for easy transport, appearance and, above all, profit. In the process millions of different varieties of plants that were perfectly adapted to their specific locations and that actually tasted good and were full of nutrients have become extinct and replaced with a monoculture of plants that are poorly adapted to their local environments and require constant inputs of chemicals and pesticides to survive. When I stop and think about it carefully it makes my blood boil.
I have been aware of this issue for a while now. I wrote my Masters thesis on the right to food and water - with a particular focus on the impact of Intellectual Property and GM technology on global food sovereignty - but I haven't been actively thinking about the issue over the past year.
That was until I started reading Barbara Kingsolver's 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'. The book is a documentation of a year in which Barbara and her family decide to live almost exclusively on food that they have grown (or raised) themselves or purchased locally from farmers that they know. Although the family decide to include meat and animal products in their diet and I cannot really relate to that decision, the book makes inspiring reading.
I am currently walking around with a burning desire to grow my own fruits and vegetables and to gain a far deeper understanding of the foods that grow well in my locality and the seasons that determine when they are at their peak, etc.
Our humble little garden is starting to bare some fruits now that Spring is so thoroughly upon us. Our little strawberry bushes are fruiting and yesterday our first tomatoes of the season arrived. We also have tons of herbs (thanks to my mother and her partner's previous gardening efforts) and some sad looking eggplant plants that may or may not come good in the next couple of months.
To be fair, we only moved in in July and small babies are not very easy to garden with, but I wish that our garden was overflowing with food.
Instead, I think that I will embark on a little self-education about fruits and vegetables and try to focus even more on eating seasonally and locally (and organically). And maybe some day in the future we will be lucky enough to be able to step partially off the grid.
How fun would that be?
I was shocked. I couldn't believe that such a terrible crime had been committed and that nothing was being done about it. I thought that people should be marching in the street at such a deliberate destruction of flowers.
Well I didn't know the half of it.
Of course this same kind of cynical breeding has been going on with all of our plants - most particularly with our grains, fruits and vegetables - and now it is being done with GM technology. The most insidious example of this is, of course, the Terminator Gene, but essentially the plants that we rely on for food have been deliberately bred for easy transport, appearance and, above all, profit. In the process millions of different varieties of plants that were perfectly adapted to their specific locations and that actually tasted good and were full of nutrients have become extinct and replaced with a monoculture of plants that are poorly adapted to their local environments and require constant inputs of chemicals and pesticides to survive. When I stop and think about it carefully it makes my blood boil.
I have been aware of this issue for a while now. I wrote my Masters thesis on the right to food and water - with a particular focus on the impact of Intellectual Property and GM technology on global food sovereignty - but I haven't been actively thinking about the issue over the past year.
That was until I started reading Barbara Kingsolver's 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'. The book is a documentation of a year in which Barbara and her family decide to live almost exclusively on food that they have grown (or raised) themselves or purchased locally from farmers that they know. Although the family decide to include meat and animal products in their diet and I cannot really relate to that decision, the book makes inspiring reading.
I am currently walking around with a burning desire to grow my own fruits and vegetables and to gain a far deeper understanding of the foods that grow well in my locality and the seasons that determine when they are at their peak, etc.
Our humble little garden is starting to bare some fruits now that Spring is so thoroughly upon us. Our little strawberry bushes are fruiting and yesterday our first tomatoes of the season arrived. We also have tons of herbs (thanks to my mother and her partner's previous gardening efforts) and some sad looking eggplant plants that may or may not come good in the next couple of months.
To be fair, we only moved in in July and small babies are not very easy to garden with, but I wish that our garden was overflowing with food.
Instead, I think that I will embark on a little self-education about fruits and vegetables and try to focus even more on eating seasonally and locally (and organically). And maybe some day in the future we will be lucky enough to be able to step partially off the grid.
How fun would that be?
Friday, 9 February 2007
US files WTO case against Chinese industrial subsidies
The US has commenced WTO dispute settlement proceedings against China. The US government alleges that a range of subsidy programmes "illegally support the export of manufactured goods as well as discriminate against imports".
Umm, am I missing something here?
The International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development notes that "Both domestic manufacturing groups and the Democratic-led Congress have been putting pressure on the Bush administration to take sterner action on trade with China. They blame unfair Chinese competition for industrial job losses and the US' yawning trade deficit".
US Trade Representative, Susan Schwab, had this to say:
The US government’s rhetoric about the damage China is doing to "free trade" – through, among other things, a devalued Yuan, dumping cheap textiles and shoes into US and EU markets and these industrial subsidies – is ridiculous in the face of continuing (with no sign of anything but the most tokenistic of gestures of reduction) and massively trade distorting agricultural subsidies.
The Chinese subsidies, particularly those in the industrial realm, might well have an impact on some US firms, the numbers of people affected by US agricultural subsidies (particularly those on corn, soybeans and cotton) world-over is significantly more substantial. Not that the US government has a habit of giving more than a passing acknowledgement to the plight of anyone outside the States (and, so might argue, to more than a few inside the country).
When close to half the world’s population live on less than US$2 per day (purchasing power parity) and the majority of them live in rural areas (though urban poverty is an increasing trend) and survive on subsistence (or close to it) agriculture, how are people to sell what little agricultural produce they have left after family consumption, when imported US and EU crops sell in markets for less than poor rural farmers can grow them?
And the US feels it has the right to whinge about Chinese trade distorting subsidies?
I think I’m going to be sick.
Think this isn’t a big issue? Then try it for yourself (or an approximation of it anyway) by taking the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s $2 a day challenge. It won’t give you any sense of how hard life is for the rural poor and, now that I think about it, you are likely to find it much easier to live on $2 a day due to US and EU trade policy, so perhaps that’s a bad idea.
A much better idea is to stop supporting the status quo and look at where the produce you buy in the supermarket is actually coming from. If there’s a farmer’s market near by try shopping there instead (in Canberra there are at least 4 that I know of – C and I head out to the one at Exhibition Park most Saturdays, the food is of a much higher standard than that at the supermarkets and significantly cheaper – thanks to cutting out the corporate greed). If you do have to buy produce at supermarkets try to get organic wherever possible, as chances are it has been produced in a much more sustainable manner (environmentally as well as economically).
End of rant.
Umm, am I missing something here?
The International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development notes that "Both domestic manufacturing groups and the Democratic-led Congress have been putting pressure on the Bush administration to take sterner action on trade with China. They blame unfair Chinese competition for industrial job losses and the US' yawning trade deficit".
US Trade Representative, Susan Schwab, had this to say:
The United States believes that China uses its basic tax laws and other tools to encourage exports and to discriminate against imports of a variety of American manufactured goods … China's subsidies can particularly distort trade conditions for small- and medium-sized American enterprises and their workers.Umm, has Schwab, or anyone in the US government, stopped for one second and thought about what the US’ agricultural subsidies are doing to "small- and medium-sized" enterprises (and micro one especially) in the global south?
The US government’s rhetoric about the damage China is doing to "free trade" – through, among other things, a devalued Yuan, dumping cheap textiles and shoes into US and EU markets and these industrial subsidies – is ridiculous in the face of continuing (with no sign of anything but the most tokenistic of gestures of reduction) and massively trade distorting agricultural subsidies.
The Chinese subsidies, particularly those in the industrial realm, might well have an impact on some US firms, the numbers of people affected by US agricultural subsidies (particularly those on corn, soybeans and cotton) world-over is significantly more substantial. Not that the US government has a habit of giving more than a passing acknowledgement to the plight of anyone outside the States (and, so might argue, to more than a few inside the country).
When close to half the world’s population live on less than US$2 per day (purchasing power parity) and the majority of them live in rural areas (though urban poverty is an increasing trend) and survive on subsistence (or close to it) agriculture, how are people to sell what little agricultural produce they have left after family consumption, when imported US and EU crops sell in markets for less than poor rural farmers can grow them?
And the US feels it has the right to whinge about Chinese trade distorting subsidies?
I think I’m going to be sick.
Think this isn’t a big issue? Then try it for yourself (or an approximation of it anyway) by taking the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s $2 a day challenge. It won’t give you any sense of how hard life is for the rural poor and, now that I think about it, you are likely to find it much easier to live on $2 a day due to US and EU trade policy, so perhaps that’s a bad idea.
A much better idea is to stop supporting the status quo and look at where the produce you buy in the supermarket is actually coming from. If there’s a farmer’s market near by try shopping there instead (in Canberra there are at least 4 that I know of – C and I head out to the one at Exhibition Park most Saturdays, the food is of a much higher standard than that at the supermarkets and significantly cheaper – thanks to cutting out the corporate greed). If you do have to buy produce at supermarkets try to get organic wherever possible, as chances are it has been produced in a much more sustainable manner (environmentally as well as economically).
End of rant.
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