The deadly myopia of the climate brahmins

There were to be few true voices from the South heard when the synchronised chatter began in Copenhagen. The idea of informed negotiation at a broad international level, and which is genuinely representative, is a dead idea. Such a gathering can bring no agreement, for such gatherings are no more than collections of incompatible definitions. We have different societies, different currencies of value, different cultural goods, different community goals, even different ideas about what a community is.

There are special interest groups (they've even taken to the labelling among more commercial farmers' associations in the South, for these are now called 'commodity interest groups'). These are people who have their hands on the levers of finance, of administrative influence, of legislative machinery and of powerful social networks. Some of them are ministers and senior bureaucrats, others are bankers and consultants, some are scientists and technical experts, some are from the North and some from the South. They are the only plural unity that was to be found in Copenhagen, and they will stand in the way of the smallest, feeblest attempt at finding common ground.

The role of the world's conventional media is to appear informed while setting new standards of shallow banality. Graphics help, so there will be plenty, as well as lurid posters, streaming video, podcasts, Twitters and what-have-you. The medium is very much the message, and this message was to be simulcast in 180 different languages (but no dialects) because we all presumably have the inalienable right to be informed. At the sorry end, when ringing statements were issued and moving short films were screened, the special interest groups took a few quiet decisions, filed into their business jets and got on with the business of saving the dollar, the yuan or the gold standard.

What will happen to the few folk at Copenhagen who have actually dwelt on what this all means, who do not as a matter of discourse rely on the powerpointed slideshow and the blackberried summary? They will be there, for their passage has been paid for, and they will seek one another out to mention music, philology, perhaps some culinary feat. They will not discuss climate change – for they do that anyway among themselves – and they know that for the great majority of us, there are stark and gritty matters of survival to be confronted every single day: food, clothing, shelter, medicine, electricity, water, sanitation, care and if possible a little love.

We will be reminded ungently that, immersed in our pedestrian lives, we don't really get it. These are sophisticated matters after all, dealing with gases and emissions, carbon credits and designated national authorities, clean development mechanisms and public-loan guarantees, protocols and certifications. Long years ago they told our great-grandmothers and fathers much the same thing as they drew lines on maps and parted them from their forests and fields, from their rivers and friends. Our poor ancestors didn't get it then either, the simple locals of the land, and then one day they did, and grew angry at such trickery and reached righteously for their spears and swords. That was when they were called mutineers and massacred for their insolence.

Their methods have not changed. In sub-Saharan Africa the special interest groups have thrown people off their homelands to grow plantations in the name of CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) projects, and they fence these off by the tens of kilometres, guard them with guns and shoot to kill, as in eastern Uganda. In sub-continental Asia they build new roads up hillsides and erect serried ranks of wind turbines on plateaus where only a few years ago simple shepherds took their goat herds to graze. There too, as in the state of Maharashtra in western India, these new totems to CDM are guarded by men with guns. In South America they move small mountains of cement into high river valleys, brutally clearing forests and then altering forever the flow and breath of fragile watersheds, as in Ecuador, to claim the benefit of CDM dams thrown callously across life-giving rivers.

What shiny new equations have all the clever consultants and their hirelings dreamt up this time? We know them for the blighted wastes that spread behind them, for the trail of ruin they have laid which runs from small town America to the sweatshops of Asia, the hot-money zones of Dubai and the Channel Islands, alongside which the farmers' widows of inner India and entire migrant hamlets of eastern Europe eke out the remainder of their tragic lives.

We were to be awash in lies from the very first day of the Copenhagen discussions on climate, for lies is the only global currency left which has no expiry date. We were to be swamped by promises to find deferred agreements and commitments to a stirring series of conferences that stretch invitingly into the foreseeable future, never mind El Niño. We were to be reminded that a Kyoto Protocol tax is a small and insignificant price to pay for the privilege of being instructed, in polysyllabic bullet-points, by the ranking brahmins of climate science and multilateral finance.

They must be stopped. No more Copenhagens and Kyotos. From Dhaka and Suriname and Bogotá and Luzon, it is the peasants who will reaffirm that it is the provisioning of local, ecological food which actually feeds the large majority of people all over the world, whether in villages or in towns. They will push the smooth-talking suits back into the hall to remind them that it is the strength of family farmers, of artisanal fisherfolk, of pastoralists, of indigenous peoples and youth, the strength of women especially and of agricultural workers, which sustain everyday practices that focus on food for people, not profit for corporations. They will call for food and agriculture to be kept out of the reeking clutches of the carbon market, and they will frame principles guided by peace, justice and community solidarity. And when they're done, and when the whirring, threatening, hypnotic spell of the climate merchants is shattered once and for all, they can return Copenhagen to its citizens and our fields to our farmers.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.