Friday, May 16, 2008

Is your suitcase heavier
upon return?

One cannot but wonder how much of the baggage delegates brought to the CSD they are taking back. Maybe we should put that another way. Everyone came to CSD 16 with hopes and/or fears. A few may have come undecided, as happens in election years. After two weeks of discussions, monologues that replaced dialogues, deliveries that defied interactions, speaking above and beneath one another – what has come of your ideas and ideals?

The review year was expected to be a time for open and frank interactions, but the way the meetings went, it would appear that our luggage was mainly open to release and had little scope to receive, digest or process.

Discussions on agriculture got caught in the thicket. Most discussions were on the mythical Green Revolution which delegates routinely viewed with lavish nostalgia, and cannot wait to see happen in Africa. We heard veiled statements about modern agricultural technologies, links to markets, agricultural inputs and the like, with few explanations as to what these really are. Delegates could have been speaking right of the web pages of philanthropists who are investing in the push to place food on African plates through the use of genetic modifications. It is instructive that this droning went on at a time when another UN event is going on in Bonn, principally locking into the issues of liability with regard to genetically modified organisms and other high impact Biosafety threats.

Opportunism and crisis

While delegates shared messages crafted from their capitals, the world witnessed new threats arising from the seizing of the food crisis as an opportunity to subvert the sensible requirements of the precautionary principles as captured in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. This new threat has arisen in the area of food aid where public statements are being made about the inclusion of GMOs in food aid. Reports of unauthorised GMOs in food aid have been recorded in both Latin America and Africa.

Today, as the world is in shock over natural and man made catastrophes, and as food aid is needed to meet food deficits, the vulnerability of the victims is being taken as a license to expose them to more dangers. It will be a missed opportunity if governments do not rise up to roundly denounce this illegal and dangerous move.

Acquiescing to this transboundary movement of GMOs without any control is the same as saying that the world does not need the Convention on Biodiversity or any such form of governance in the way these organisms are handled and spread in the world. The winners will be the marketers of these unregulated technologies. The losers will be the world and her peoples.

When will it change?

One day soon we may be called upon to privatise government. If the private sector is so efficient in running things in a way that government cannot, why waste our time with inefficient government machineries. Who not have Managing Directors of countries X, Y and Z rather than Presidents or Prime Ministers?

During the weeks we heard very clever statements about how agrofuels grown on degraded land do not threaten food production because there are always more degraded lands to expand into. Really? What was not addressed was the fact that the land uses that degraded the land in the first place moves onto other productive land and as need pressures are built by agrofuels cultivation, more prime land will be gobbled up.

We heard frequent talks about production for exports from Africa. Consumers of agrofuels see Africa as one huge farmland. Africa is seen as a food deficit continent where all the indicators for meeting the MDGs run in the red. Cash cropping is the major colonial heritage of the continent. When will the continent stop being the world’s fodder farm?

Hypocrisy defined

The Children and Youth made very constructive contributions throughout the CSD16 events. They even recorded a denial of a nudge for change at the cafeteria! The fact that they were denied the space to ask delegates if they would prefer fair trade agricultural products says a lot about both the UN and government delegations at the CSD. What other way can you practically define hypocrisy?

The next time delegates gather on the issues in focus, it will be to negotiate policy. It will be time for brackets and squabbles over meaningful and less meaningful words.

As luggage is packed for the homeward trip, how open have you become in terms of considering new information received, from both the Major Groups and other delegates? Will you return with the baggage you came with, or will it be that plus some picked up from the conference rooms and the bastion of unfair trade, the gourmet palace or cafeteria?