Chavez Announces Project to Combat Food Shortages in Venezuela

Chris Carlson, January 21, Venezuelanalysis.com

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez focused on the persistent shortages in the nation's supply of milk and meat products during his Sunday TV and radio show Aló Presidente yesterday. The president inaugurated a "socialist" milk processing plant, as well as an agro-industrial complex with the goal of increasing national production and solving food shortages in the country.

"We have to raise national production of meat and milk," said Chavez during the show. "We are going to transform Venezuela into a true superpower in food production."

The show was aired Sunday from a rural town near the Colombian border in the western state of Zulia where the Chavez government plans to install a "mega-project" for the production of milk and other products. The pilot program is meant as a solution to persistent food shortages that have affected the country since last year.

The president began the show by awarding land titles to local farmers, emphasizing the damage that concentrated land ownership does to national production, and insisting that the government carry forward with land reform policies.

He also announced a new program of low-cost credits to small producers as a way to increase investment in the agricultural sector.

"I have approved an extraordinary amount for the agricultural sector," said Chavez. "We are going to increase short-term credit, with low interest, and we are going to raise food production in Venezuela."

President Chavez also announced the creation of a cattle-producing complex in the region that will provide inputs to a "socialist" milk-processing plant inaugurated nearby.

The milk plant, which Chavez claims to be one of the largest in Latin America with a capacity of 1 million liters of milk per day, was bought by the Venezuelan government from the Italian multinational Parmalat for BsF. 800 million (US$ 372 million) after the company abandoned it.

Chavez said the plant is now operating, but producing only 60 thousand liters per day, which is 6 percent of its capacity. The Venezuelan government hopes the plant will be producing 400 thousand liters per day by next month, and 800 thousands liters per day by 2009.

The Venezuelan president explained the reasons for the shortages of milk and beef products that the country has experienced over the last year. Chavez referred to a chart showing how national milk production has remained relatively equal in recent years, whereas national consumption has exploded in the last two years. He insisted that it is the same situation with beef, forcing the country to import large amounts of milk and beef.

Chavez explained that world milk consumption had also grown by 20 percent in the last 10 years, in part due to China's increased consumption of milk, whereas milk production has only grown by 1 percent, causing world-wide shortages.

The Venezuelan government has made the claim that these shortages, as well as government price controls, have led to speculation on the part of large dairy producers who sell their production to producers of cheese and other goods in order to avoid the price controls.

In response, Chavez threatened to expropriate dairy farms that refuse to sell their production, or who sell it abroad. At the same time, he announced a 40 percent increase in the price of milk to help milk producers.

"I am aware that the price of milk is coming up short. That's why I am willing to elevate it a little to benefit all the primary producers," he said, but he issued a warning to large milk companies.

"I am going to warn the large milk-processing companies: Any producer that doesn't sell their milk to the nation will be treated as a traitor," he said.

But ultimately the government strategy is to increase national production through the construction of these "socialist" milk-processing plants, along with cattle-producing zones in the surrounding areas to supply them. The milk plants are placed under the management and control of the local communal councils in the surrounding communities, with support from the national government in the form of credit and technical assistance.

The strategy also includes a continuation of turning unproductive land over to small producers for the production of crops or livestock. The president of the National Land Institute announced yesterday that the government distributed some 50,000 hectares (123,000 acres) in the last year and that they would continue with this in 2008.

"This year the expropriation of land will be projected to the development and production of cattle-producing farms around these milk-processing plants," he said.

Chavez assured that the nation's supply of cattle had already increased from 10 million head to 12 million head, and that by next year this number would reach 16 million. He assured that Venezuela would become a cattle "superpower" in the near future.

"We want to strengthen national production so we are fully supplied by February of 2009," he said.

Rich countries owe poor a huge environmental debt

January 21, The Guardian

The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world's richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries.

The study found that there are huge disparities in the ecological footprint inflicted by rich and poor countries on the rest of the world because of differences in consumption. The authors say that the west's high living standards are maintained in part through the huge unrecognised ecological debts it has built up with developing countries.

"At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor," said Prof Richard Norgaard, an ecological economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. "That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don't see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here."

Using data from the World Bank and the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the researchers examined so-called "environmental externalities" or costs that are not included in the prices paid for goods but which cover ecological damage linked to their consumption. They focused on six areas: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and converting mangrove swamps into shrimp farms.

The team calculated the costs of consumption in low, medium and high income countries, both within their borders and outside, from 1961 to 2000. The team used UN definitions for countries in different income categories. Low income countries included Pakistan, Nigeria and Vietnam, and middle income nations included Brazil and China. Rich countries in the study included the UK, US and Japan.

Striking disparities

The magnitude of effects outside the home country was different for each category of consumption. For example, deforestation and agricultural intensification primarily affect the host country, while the impacts from climate change and ozone depletion show up the disparity between rich and poor most strikingly.

Greenhouse emissions from low-income countries have imposed $740 billion of damage on rich countries, while in return rich countries have imposed $2.3 trillion of damage. This damage includes, for example, flooding from more severe storms as a result of climate change.

Likewise, CFC emissions from rich countries have inflicted between $25 billion and £57 billion of damage to the poorest countries. Increased ultraviolet levels from the ozone hole have led to higher healthcare costs from skin cancer and eye problems. The converse figure is between $0.58 and $1.3 billion.

The team publish their results today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."We know already that climate change is a huge injustice inflicted on the poor," said Dr Neil Adger at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, who was not involved in the research, "This paper is actually the first systematic quantification to produce a map of that ecological debt. Not only for climate change but also for these other areas."

"This is an accounting tool that allows you to say how much the high-income world owes the low-income world for the environmental externalities we impose on them," he said.

The team confined its calculations to areas in which the costs of environmental damage, for example in terms of lost services from ecosystems, are well understood. That meant leaving out damage from excessive freshwater withdrawals, destruction of coral reefs, biodiversity loss, invasive species and war. So the researchers believe the figures represent a minimum estimate of the true cost.

"We think the measured impact is conservative. And given that it's conservative, the numbers are very striking," said co-author Dr Thara Srinivasan, who is also at Berkeley.

Biofuel boom costs Indonesians dear

Step Vaessen, January 19, Al Jazeera

Indonesia is struggling with a potential food crisis, because of rapidly increasing prices of one of its staple food items.

The cost of soya bean has doubled on the world market in recent months, making imports of the commodity increasingly expensive.

The main cause of the price rise in Indonesia is shifting production in the US.

Biofuels phenomenon

A US energy bill signed into law last September, encouraged a massive increase in the production of biofuels like ethanol.

Soya bean and corn, once used mostly for food, are now being converted into fuel.

That means soaring prices for Indonesia's "food of the poor".

Take the case of Tukino. His family has been running a home factory for the last 34 years, making bean curd, one of Indonesia's most popular dishes.

Bean curd is a staple of Indonesian dietBut never before has soya bean been so expensive.

The price has doubled during the past few weeks.

Analysts say this is because US farmers are replacing the crop in order to grow corn for biofuel instead.

Tukino says: "We are really suffering from this. We are sweating here everyday just to make ends meet.

"I am trying to run a business but if this situation continues a lot of people have to be laid off."

Bean-curd factories like the one run by Tukino's family went on strike for three days to protest against the price increase.

But after consumers began to complain, they decided to operate again.

Nutritious and cheap

Bean curd has kept many poor Indonesians healthy for a very long time.

It is very nutritious and it used to be very cheap, but now Indonesia's favourite food is becoming very expensive and hard to get. And this is already creating unrest.

To calm down sentiments, bean curd and tempeh, another popular soya bean dish, are being sold again on the market, much to the relief of many Indonesians.

But while the price is still the same, the sellers have made the portions much smaller.

One resident of Jakarta said: "My children don't want to eat anything when there is no tempeh or bean curd. They simply don't feel well if I don't serve it to them.

"Normally I could buy it at a food stall, but there hasn't been enough in the market for quite a while."

Farmers' view

The Indonesian Farmers Union says the country should become self-sufficient again and start growing soya bean as it used to do in the past.

Henry Saragih, from the Indonesian Farmers Union, says: "This is a basic need which is now very hard to get.

"This is not only turning in to a social crisis, but this could also cause hunger and malnutrition."

The government admits that it should have worked harder to achieve self-sufficiency.

Sutarto Alimoeso, an agriculture ministry official in charge of food crops, told Al Jazeera: "This is an international problem, we cannot stop free trade.

"But we should indeed have protected our farmers more. There is not a single country that doesn't protect its own farmers. We should have been braver."

For the time being the Indonesian government has decided to control the price of soya bean by asking the state food company to buy stock overseas.

This could prevent a deepening food crisis in the country for now.

Still, in the long term, other measures may have to be found.

Fossil Fools' Day

Link: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/736/38101

Call for a national day of action against climate change on April 1, 2008 The latest research shows that the effects of climate change are speeding up, with real dangers of self-perpetuating, or “runaway”, global warming. At the same time, global carbon emissions are rising at higher rates than ever before. Australia continues to hold the position of the highest greenhouse gas emitting country per capita, and is the world’s biggest exporter of coal.

The message is clear — the world can’t wait. For far too long fossil fuel industries and other dirty industries have been dangerously fooling around with the planet and our future.

This is a call from Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network for a national day of student action against the fossil fools in industry and parliament, who are pushing the earth towards climate chaos.

The movement for action on climate change has made a lot of progress in the past two years. We forced climate skeptics to acknowledge the problem and helped to get rid of the Howard government for its inaction on climate change. While the Rudd government’s decision to ratify Kyoto represents a victory for the movement, our job is far from over.

The reality is that if Australia does not move immediately to break its dependence on fossil fuels, no meaningful emission reduction targets will be met. We have to demand that state and federal governments stop the expansion of the coal industry, reverse the approval of the pulp mill in Tasmania, keep electricity generation in public hands and shift the billions of dollars of government funds currently spent each year to subsidise the fossil fuel industries into renewable energy industries.

As students and young people, we have an important role to play in propelling the climate action movement forward and forcing the government to take the necessary action. We have to break the bipartisan consensus on mythical “clean coal” technology and uranium mining. We have to end the wars for oil. And we want to see investment into our universities for researching renewable, not fossil fuel and nuclear, technologies.

The youth blocs of high school and university students at Walk Against Warming in 2007 were an example of what we can organise on a much bigger scale this year, as we build the student environment movement. Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network are calling on everyone concerned about climate change to initiate discussions and start planning a nationally-coordinated day of student action on April 1 — Fossil Fools’ Day, as part of an international day of action planned for that day.

Climate change, sea level rise to cost Vietnam dearly

Quang Duan, January 12, Thanhnien News

Vietnam is highly vulnerable to climate change, with rising sea levels to affect vast areas of the country, including heavily populated regions, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) said Friday.

A sea level rise of one meter will flood up to 12 percent of Vietnam's land and affect nearly 11 percent of its population, according to a MARD report released at a climate change conference in Hanoi.

A one meter sea level rise would inundate about 5,000 square kilometers of northern Vietnam's Red River Delta and up to 20,000 square kilometers in the Mekong Delta in the south.

River and sea dike systems would crumble in destructive typhoons and storms caused by climate change, the report said.

Higher sea levels would also decimate the nation's crops, with food output reduced by 12 percent, or five million tons a year.

Extreme weather would cause natural disasters such as severe floods, which could lead to outbreaks of human and animal diseases.

Deputy Minister Dao Xuan Hoc action must be taken immediately or it would be too late.

The ministry is conducting research to develop a plan to promote afforestation, the use of environmentally-friendly production technology and upgrades of the nation's dikes and irrigation systems.

Hoc said scientists were drafting plans for reinforcing dikes in the Mekong Delta and the central region.

The resettlement of vulnerable residents from flood and landslide-prone areas had already been carried out effectively.

However, the number of residents that still need to be resettled was massive, he said.

Southern hub concern

In a talk with Thanh Nien on the sideline of the conference, Hoc said the ministry was conducting studies on how to reduce flooding in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).

Under a draft plan, the city will build eight major drains at a cost of about VND8 trillion (US$500 million) in the precincts of the Saigon and Dong Nai rivers.

Hoc said the plan would be put to the city administration before being submitted to the government.

The ministry also recommended the municipal administration increase the capacity of water reservoirs in order to reduce city flooding.

Answering my question

[I posted an email to an Engineers and Scientists for Sustainability group that i was briefly involved with at the University of WA, about the question of CO2 vs CO2e and stabilisation targets. This is very good and clarifying response i recieved from a friend of mine.]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 12:16:58PM +0900, Trent Hawkins wrote:
> Great article, but im confused. The articles talks about 450ppm CO2 (only)
> as being the oldskool theoretical benchmark, whereas i thought it was 450ppm

Yes, this point is confusing and being an op-ed I'll wait for a paper or further statement to clarify.

Now, apart from being a "total GHG" v CO2 issue, it's also an issue whether they're talking about stabilisation concentration or not.

> CO2e. See the confusion is that we are already somewhere close to 450ppm
> CO2e, round about 430-440 at the moment. Given the lag in the system, this

There is a lot of confusion about this point in general. What you say is both true and false. This is actually best described in terms of forcings, not gas concentrations, but I'll try to use the latter.

The current CO2 concentration is about 383ppm. There have been also increases in other greenhouse gasses, like CH4, NOx, CFCs, etc, which add approximatelly 70ppm CO2 equivalent worth of forcing on top of that.

However, there are other additional manmade forcings, such as SO2, which effectively cancel out the non-CO2 gases in the atmosphere.

So the nett effect _currently_ is about 375ppm CO2e.

Now some vocal people like Monbiot, Tim Flannery have made statement along the lines of what you're saying. There's an article about this at realclimate, here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/co2-equivalents/

(Monbiot is now calling for reductions of 110%, see: http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/node/251)

However, there's an additional uncertainty here, because some of the negative forcing agents have much shorter lifetimes than the long-lived greenhouse gasses and so may precipitate out quickly if they stop being emitted.

To be honest, I haven't found a clear explanation (by a climatologist) which address this issue adequatelly. I think one could expect that if all emissions ceased today, the effective forcing would go up, but probably not up to 430-440ppm CO2 equivalent levels.

> would mean that we pretty much need to be doing what the article suggests
> and stabilise carbon emissions ASAP. Obviously Hanson's research says we
> need to aim for 350ppm CO2 (only) and we are currently at 380ppm +, then we
> need to basically have negative GHG emissions, but is this really anything
> overwhelmingly different to what previous studies have shown?

So, is this saying anything overwhelming different? It seems to be, but I can't be sure, because the op-ed isn't clear. Hansen has previously advocated keeping CO2 levels below 450-475ppm (see attached letter and paper), resulting in an additional temperature increase of ~1degC (~1.8degC above pre-industrial).

Now, it _seems_ he's advocating 350ppm or somewhere closer to 1.5degC above pre-industrial. With last year's record arctic ice-melt, it's plausible his position has changed, but we'll have to wait for more information to be sure.

Alternatively, it is possible that he was just talking about 350ppm _stabilisation_, which is broadly consistent with not passing 450ppm at all (and the AR4), as well as 450ppm CO2e stabilisation.

As far as negative GHG emissions are concerned, then no, we wouldn't have to extract GHGs out of the atmosphere if we suddenly stopped emitting today (to reach 350ppm CO2 stabilisation). All we'd need to do is reduce our emissions by more than the airborne fraction.

The airborne fraction is the proportion of our emissions that ends up in the atmosphere and has historically been around 58% (though is likely to increase, and probably is already beginning to). The other 42% has been absorbed by the ocean and biosphere.

Now, the nett CO2 flux between the ocean and atmosphere is mostly dependant upon the CO2 concentration in the two systems and the temperature. (Think of the CO2 flux in a shaken beer bottle) i.e. additional emissions only have a slight effect on it in the short term.

So that if we bring emissions down by about 60% globally, the atmospheric concentration should stabilise, for a while. If we decrease by more then it would decline.

There's a good piece which touches on this issue here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/how-much-co2-emission-is-too-much/

Of course the reality of the situation is that we won't suddenly stop emitting, hence we should be cutting emissions as fast as possible.

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

[This is quite an interesting article, however the one confusion that i have is the distinction between CO2 and CO2e. I thought that the Stern report and other reports have indicated the need to stabilise CO2e to approx 450ppm to avoid anything more than a 2degC temp increase? Yet here it talks about 450ppm in terms of CO2 (only). Perhaps someone reading my blog can help?

Nonetheless i think the last point is the key one, i.e. the analogy with Cholesterol. What we need is a qualitative change in the way humanity interacts with nature, that is - to stop climate change we need social change. The key question for environment activists is how are we going to acheive it? Well to borrow a phrase from Lenin, without Marxist theory you can't have proper practice.

I hope to write about this question soon, as i feel there is an ever pressing need to outline some of the key tasks of eco-socialists, such as the need for a class analysis of society, what specific features of capitalism are responsible for climate change, how democratic centralised planning of socialised means of production can avert the crises (and even achieve negative GHG emissions reductions), the need to connect the organised sections of the working class with the environment movement, and the vital role a Leninist Party can play in leading the environment movement to achieve its necessary tasks - putting the strategic (and polluting) industries under control of the world's working people.

But in the meantime to borrow another phrase from Lenin (although he also borrowed this one from Napolean) we need to "engage and then see", throw ourselves into the environment movement and then see what the key problems are and how we can assist.]

Bill McKibben, December 28, 2007, Washington Post

This month may have been the most important yet in the two-decade history of the fight against global warming. Al Gore got his Nobel in Stockholm; international negotiators made real progress on a treaty in Bali; and in Washington, Congress actually worked up the nerve to raise gas mileage standards for cars.

But what may turn out to be the most crucial development went largely unnoticed. It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future.

To understand what it means, you need a little background.

Twenty years ago, Hansen kicked off this issue by testifying before Congress that the planet was warming and that people were the cause. At the time, we could only guess how much warming it would take to put us in real danger. Since the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million, scientists and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled -- 550 was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point. The answer was: not easily, but it could be done.

In the past five years, though, scientists began to worry that the planet was reacting more quickly than they had expected to the relatively small temperature increases we've already seen. The rapid melt of most glacial systems, for instance, convinced many that 450 parts per million was a more prudent target. That's what the European Union and many of the big environmental groups have been proposing in recent years, and the economic modeling makes clear that achieving it is still possible, though the chances diminish with every new coal-fired power plant.

But the data just keep getting worse. The news this fall that Arctic sea ice was melting at an off-the-charts pace and data from Greenland suggesting that its giant ice sheet was starting to slide into the ocean make even 450 look too high. Consider: We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know.