Agriculture was one key focus for the global climate change talks that have just concluded in Marrakesh. There’s two good reasons for that.

One is that it’s one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions as a sector, on a par with transport and industry.

It contributes about 12% of emissions directly, but add in forestry and other landuse changes, much of which (about 70%) involves clearing of land for agriculture, and that account for another 12% of GHG emissions.

On electricity generation and transport, the ways forward towards a sustainable future are clear. Electricity generation needs to be via renewables, and there needs to be a strong focus on reducing the need for energy through energy efficiency.

As for transport, we need a massive modal shift to ‘active transport’ (like walking and cycling) and public transport, with electric cars to fill in the gaps. We mightn’t be doing enough, but broadly we know what needs to be done.

When it comes to agriculture, however, we don’t really have a clear idea of the way forward. That’s one reason why the discussions in Marrakesh were so important.

‘Adaptation means ensuring there’s enough food to go round’

The other reason is that there’s two aspects of policies on climate change. They are known as mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means preventing emissions (or drawing carbon out of the atmosphere), and adaptation means working with the changing climate and protecting human societies.

Adaptation means, put simply, survival. The agricultural issue that featured high on many sessions in Marrakesh – in the Africa pavilion in particular but by no means exclusively – was food security.

It is worth saying there is currently plenty of food in the world. The fact that 800 million people regularly go to bed hungry is a failure of distribution, not production.

But the world’s population is growing, and production is under threat from the damage being done by the industrial agriculture that’s trashing our soils, drawing down fossil water supplies and polluting our rivers and oceans.

Adaptation means ensuring there’s enough food to go around in future in our changing climate. That’s a huge ask.

Under even a ‘business as usual’ scenario, one part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is relatively easy, at least politically – avoiding food loss and waste: that could have a big impact. Another – reducing the use of nitrogen fertilisers, which can result in the production of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide – is at least imaginable.

Further, we could reduce total meat consumption, which would also be a positive for human health. There’s also mooted technical solutions to reduce the methane production from livestock, including improving feeding and breeding, feeding methane inhibitors to livestock and better management of manure.

‘Climate smart’ versus agroecology

Then we need to start greater changes to agriculture. Industrial farming has massively reduced the amount of carbon stored in the soil (as has clearing forests for arable farming). Changing the system of farming is essential to start to restore that.

Two models of the future were setting out their stall at COP:

• One is known as ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’. It’s basically a business-as-usual model with technological tweaks. It’s the model of agribusiness, of the giant multinational companies that dominate much of the profits of global agriculture, of grand promises from genetically modified organisms that have failed to deliver even what they’ve promised so far, even while small-scale farmers on generally low incomes dominate the production of food.
• The other is agroecology, an approach that aims to work with nature rather than to master it, that focuses on biodiverse farming, using local skills and knowledge, and locally developed crops and varieties, with minimal outside inputs. It’s an approach that encourages small independent businesses, lots of jobs, and varied seasonal food supplies for communities.

I believe that agroecology is the only possible approach: climate change is only one of many pressing environmental issues that threaten our future and that of the Earth as a balanced ecosystem. Agroecology addresses such diverse problems as biodiversity loss, soil degradation, pollution of our rivers and oceans. And it can create huge numbers of jobs, sustain small businesses, and offer far greater food security.

Understandably, there was at COP a lot of talk about the development of agroecology for the Global South, where food security is the most obviously pressing issue. But I’m interested in how we can develop this in the UK – where we also need to think hard about food security – given that we import 40% of our food, and 75% of our fruit and vegetables, which are particularly critical for health.

Building agroecology from the roots up

At the moment most towns and cities have one, or at most a handful, of market garden-type farms operating in more or less an agroecological manner – through cooperatives, through Community Supported Agriculture, through individual effort. Many rely on volunteer labour to help keep them going, and/or school visits and ‘farm tourism’ for at least some of their income. That’s not a model scalable to the size we need.

I’ve seen a couple of examples heading in a more commercial direction – Riverside Market Garden outside Cardiff, which had funding from the Welsh government explicitly to help to develop a commercial model, the Kindling Trust in Manchester, OrganicLea in London.

On a larger scale, there are organic farms (and farms operating with these kinds of methods, if not formally organic), mostly family-owned, operating in as responsible a way as the current legislative and economic frameworks allow them, producing food in larger quantities.

It’s a start, but we need a great deal more. And as a ‘co-benefit’ in the language of COP, we’d also get many thousands of small independent businesses, huge numbers of good jobs – and far better tasting food available to more people, without the choking hold of the supermarkets over supplies.

Changes in our economy, society and treatment of the environment for the common good – that makes agroecology one essential part of our future. We’ve made a start but there’s a very long way to go.

Natalie Bennett attended the COP talks in Marrakesh with the Green Economics Institute.

When India ushered in neoliberal economic reforms during the early 1990s, the promise was job creation, inclusive growth and prosperity for all.

But some 25 years later, what we have seen is almost 400,000 farmers committing suicide, one of the greatest levels of inequality out of all ’emerging’ economies, a trend towards jobless ‘growth’, an accelerating and massive illegal outflow of wealth by the rich.

And, as if that were not enough, now we have the sequestration of ordinary people’s money under the euphemism ‘demonetization’.

Data from the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index indicates that 20 years ago, India had the second-best social indicators among the six South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan).

But now it has the second worst position, ahead only of Pakistan. Bangladesh has less than half of India’s per-capita GDP but has infant and child mortality rates lower than that of India.

Under neoliberalism, India leads Asia in income inequality

The neoliberal model of development has moreover arguably seen the poverty alleviation rate in India remain around the same as it was back pre-independent India, while the ratio between the top and bottom 10% of the population has doubled since 1991.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, this doubling of income inequality has made India one of the worst performers in the category of emerging economies.

Neoliberalism in India has been underpinned by unconstitutional land takeovers and population displacement, with the state using military and para-military forces in the process alongside the suspension of various democratic rights and the wide scale abuse of human rights.

For supporters of cronyism, cartels and the monopolization of markets by private interests, which to all extents and purposes is what neoliberalism thrives on in India (and elsewhere), there have been untold opportunities for well-placed individuals to make an under-the-table fast buck from various infrastructure projects and privatisation sell offs.

But PM Modi interprets all of this in a different way, which comes as little surprise, given harsh the reality – not the media misrepresentations – of what he ‘achieved’ in Gujarat as Chief Minister. He recently stated that India is now one of the most business-friendly countries in the world.

The code for being ‘business friendly’ translates into a willingness by the government to facilitate much of what is outlined above, while reducing taxes and tariffs and allowing the acquisition of public assets via privatisation as well as instituting policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign corporations.

‘National’ interest the opposite of the peoples’ interest

In agriculture, for instance, we are seeing the displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are obliged to produce for global entities, state enterprises are being run down or (semi-)privatised and independent agricultural producers are impoverished.

The tragedy is that model that is intended to supplant the existing one is based on Cargill / Monsanto’s environment- and livelihood-destroying business models for corporate profit which have become synonymous with the ‘national interest’.

Unfortunately, people like Aruna Rodrigues and Vandana Shiva and certain NGOs who criticise this and offer credible alternatives are regarded by elements of the state as either working against the interest of the nation or colluding with ‘foreign interests’ – when the reality is that the state is doing exactly that!

Seeds, mountains, water, forests and biodiversity are being sold off. The farmers and tribals are being sold out. And the more that gets sold off, the more who get sold out, the greater the amount of cash and credit goes into corporate accounts and the easier it is for the misinformed to swallow the lie of ‘growth’.

As the state abdicates it redistributive role and facilitates the World Bank’s agenda, India is suddenly labelled capitalism’s ‘economic miracle’.

The opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing efficiency, job creation and boosting growth. According to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and good for business. But just how many jobs actually get created is another matter, as is the amount of jobs destroyed in the first place to pave the way for the entry of foreign corporations.

For example, Cargill sets up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people, but what about the agricultural jobs that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the village-level processors who were cynically put out of business so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?

Hundreds of millions of livelihoods are in danger as foreign corporations and capital smells massive profits on the back of the World Bank-backed commercialisation of rural India.

An ‘economic miracle’ built on debt and dispossession

India’s much-lauded economic growth in recent times has been built on consumer and corporate debt. Corporate subsidies and (real estate) investment bubbles have given the impression of economic prosperity. And it is merely an ‘impression’.

For instance, consider the amount of tax breaks and handouts given to the corporate sector and what little it has achieved in return in terms of jobs or exports. And consider too the massive amount of corporate debt written off by state-owned banks, while farmers kill themselves en masse because of debt, partly due to Monsanto’s capture of the cotton sector and partly because of economic liberalisation and increasing exposure to rigged markets courtesy of the WTO.

And so to the latest heist – ‘demonetization’. According to Binu Mathew, banks in India were facing a liquidity crisis and parts of the debt-inflated economy were in danger of imploding. In this respect, Modi’s outlawing of almost 90% of India’s cash notes overnight is basically a bail-out/windfall for the corporate elites and real estate speculators.

This tactic neatly removed the danger of creating inflation by merely printing money. You can forget about Western-style bank bailouts and subsequent ‘austerity’, the Indian government decided to sequester the public’s money directly in an attempt to keep the neoliberal crony capitalism Ponzi scheme on course. As Mathew says:

“The banks will lend out the money ‘confiscated from you’. Who will benefit? Not the poor farmers who are committing suicide by their thousands every month. Not the children who are dying of malnutrition in several parts of the country. Not the small manufacturers who are struggling to keep up their businesses.

“Who will benefit? The crony capitalists that props up the Modi regime. This demonetization is the biggest crony capitalist neo-liberalist coup that has ever taken place in India. Never doubt it, India will have to pay a heavy price for it.”

As in the US, the undermining of a productive economic base – in India’s case, a failure to boost industrial manufacturing performance and jobs and pumping up the economy with credit, while at the same time dismantling its greatest asset – the agrarian base – can only lead to a dead-end.

Courtesy of its compliant politicians, India has hitched a ride aboard the wholly corrupt neoliberal bandwagon to nowhere.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

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A Danish court in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands has found Sea Shepherd Captain Jessie Treverton of the UK guilty of breaching Faroese animal welfare laws by causing “unnecessary suffering” to a pod of dolphins.

The conviction is replete with irony as Sea Shepherd was only present in waters off the Faroe Islands, a self-governing territory of Denmark, in an attempt to prevent the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins and other cetaceans.

And the alleged ‘cruelty’ against the dolphins consisted of trying to guide them away from a killing beach where they faced certain death at the hands of islanders wielding long, razor-sharp knives.

Each year over 800 pilot whales and other small cetaceans are regularly slaughtered in the Faroe Islands in a practice known as the grindadráp, which Sea Shepherd has actively opposed since the 1980s.

It was during one of these actions on 17th September 2014 that Captain Treverton and two other Sea Shepherd crew members from France attempted to protect a pod of over 200 officially protected Atlantic white-sided dolphins from the grindadráp.

They attempted to drive them away from one of the Faroe Islands’ 23 ‘approved killing beaches’ using their speedboat MV Spitfire. After being chased and boarded by Danish armed forces, the boat was confiscated and the three women were arrested by Faroese police.

‘A legal precedent has been set, driving dolphins is against Faroese law.’

After multiple postponements of her trial date by the Danish court in the Faroe Islands, on November 24th Captain Treverton’s case was finally heard, wherin she was found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to a pod of dolphins and ordered to pay a fine of 5,500 Danish Kroner (approximately €740).

“I am very happy to accept the court’s verdict that my driving a pod of dolphins to safety was against animal welfare laws, because if the law applies to me then it surely must also apply to the Faroese people”, said Captain Treverton. “A legal precedent has been set, driving dolphins is against Faroese law. This is a victory for the oceans.”

“This is a landmark ruling”, said Geert Vons, campaign leader for Sea Shepherd’s operations against the grindadráp. “Jessie’s guilty verdict sets a precedent that the process of manoeuvring a small boat with view to ‘herd’ dolphins is considered a breach of the Faroese animal welfare law. This is exactly what the Faroese boats do when they herd pods of pilot whales onto the killing beaches to be slaughtered.”

Commenting on the arrest of Captain Treverton and the two crew members at the time, Sea Shepherd Founder Captain Paul Watson said:

“Apparently in the Faroe Islands it is perfectly legal to kill a protected species, but it is illegal to push them back out to sea in order to keep them from harm’s way because that is considered ‘harassment’. The good news is, however, that a pod of hundreds of white-sided dolphins were successfully ‘harassed’ away from the vicious knives of the whalers. 

“Last year, in August 2013, 450 white-sided dolphins fell to the cruel knives of these cetacean-slaughtering thugs. Fortunately the hundreds spotted today remain safe at sea. These three Sea Shepherd women can proudly say that they successfully ‘harassed’ the dolphins for the purpose of saving their lives.” 

But the boat is returned to Sea Shepherd, with its engines

The Faroese prosecutor attempted to argue in court that the boat should not be returned, or only the Spitfire’s hull should be returned without the two 200hp engines. However, the Danish judge ruled that the MV Spitfire be given back intact.

“After over two years of being denied use of MV Spitfire, Sea Shepherd UK has successfully challenged the Faroese prosecutor’s decision to seize the boat”, said Rob Read, Sea Shepherd UK’s Chief Operations Officer, who was present at the six-hour hearing on to challenge the seizure and confiscation of the MV Spitfire.

“Only when comprehensive checks on the condition of the boat and engines have been completed in the Faroe Islands will the Spitfire return to the UK.”

In expectation of this ruling, Captain Treverton has provided police with a significant amount of video evidence to open an investigation into multiple breaches of Faroese animal welfare laws by Faroes participants in the 2016 grindadráp.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

I’ve just met somebody who is successfully living a double life in London. For two years, she even went to the extremes of going undercover as a man. Amazingly, the security services suspect nothing…

In the art world, though, her cover is well and truly blown.

She is the internationally renowned artist Lesley Hilling, whose advocacy of the double life is most magnificently illustrated by her imaginative use of recycled wood in her intriguing sculptures.

The lure of a second identity didn’t stop at her choice of materials, however. She confesses, “Originally, my constructions didn’t sit well with the contemporary art of the time, so I decided I needed another way to explain it. The idea of creating a story around a fictional, reclusive ex-architect called Joseph Boshier who built wooden sculptures gathered its own momentum.

“As a result, it ended up with a 20-minute documentary about the Boshier character and a gallery opening showing his work… which was actually mine.”

Hilling admits (mischievously): “The subterfuge worked so well that some people even believed they had heard of Boshier’s non-existent architectural work beforehand.”

Whether this alter ego was genuinely required to raise her profile is debatable, given the collectability of her catalogue of work these days. But the daring left field conceit fits well with Hilling’s lifestyle. She is not your average artist and her home and studio in Brixton is certainly not your conventional set-up. It is a house of curiosity – stockpiled with quirky collectibles and wood – lots of it, in all shapes and hues that she has acquired over the years. Even her firewood log pile is graded neatly into types and sizes! In fact, there are so many found objects, she needed additional storage and so her doors are constructed from an amalgam of boxes and shelves with concealed compartments that hold intriguing artifacts from glassware from a chemistry lab, clocks, globes and magnifying lenses to some of Hilling’s father’s old woodworking tools.

Given the age of the various artifacts, these doors feel like mini time capsules; while the sensation of slipping through a portal is even more intense in her cramped studio workshop. Here, her unique and huge constructions grow organically, sometimes inspired by the shape of a single piece of time-aged wood.

Hilling explains, “Once the basic idea is there, the work will evolve – it feels like there is an unseen hand at work and I am its caretaker. I like to use the hues of the wood as if I’m a painter. Often the piece will have a gradient from dark to light.”

The first step is to engineer a sturdy, hidden back frame to carry the weight of the piece. She then begins to build a maze of shapes on top, usually six or seven layers, until it resembles a complicated Lilliputian city grid. She has a near encyclopaedic knowledge of where various pieces of wood are stashed in her studio or around the house but sometimes in heading for a specific item, she stumbles upon an old forgotten trinket and the work veers in a different direction again.

Each piece requires great dedication as well as many, many hours of meticulous craftsmanship. Embedded within the wooden structure of her current project are watches, piano note hammers, fish scales, acupuncture needles and postcards. Even possessions such as stamps, coins or finely scripted letters and photographs from her family’s collection become part of her artworks. She explains: “I like to include heirlooms in most of my work. I know then that things like family pictures are safe and live on in the piece.”

As well as the gift for impersonation, this particular artist probably has the energy of two people too. Apart from her demanding creative work, she is an active member of Brixton Housing Co-op, a tenant led Co-op with properties in Brixton. Her home is one of a cluster of 22 houses that were renovated in the 1980s having been squatted by a group of gay men in the seventies. It still retains its LGBT history. The communal garden comes with a smattering of Hilling ‘fairy dust’, featuring an interconnecting network of wooden walkways that snakes a route through lush plants. The space is so beautiful that it clearly compensates the neighbours for the whine of Hilling’s band saw, which can whir into the night when she hits a purple patch, Her next-door neighbour certainly doesn’t mind and supplies a delicious and moorish the lemon drizzle cake the day I visit.

It comes as no surprise, given the basis of her art, that Hilling is a passionate environmentalist. As well as exhibiting with the Knight Webb gallery, Hilling is a core member of Human Nature, a group of 30 like-minded artists aiming to change the way people think and act about the natural environment through their work.

Hilling expands: “I hope that people will see that art can be made from anything, not only art but lots of things thrown away can be put to a good use. Often things made from recycled materials are more interesting and beautiful and can trigger ideas.”

As I leave Hilling in her studio among the saws, glass and hammers, she decides to get an overview of her current growing artwork by standing precariously on a wobbly stool and I conclude that not only has this fascinating artist defied the security services, she’s undaunted by health and safety too.

Lesley Hilling’s work can be found at www.lesleyhilling.co.uk

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Gary Cook is a conservation artist and Arts Editor for the Ecologist

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