As the COP21 Paris Summit on Climate Change opens today
bringing in together over 40000 people, many of those attending the summit it
will be another hand shaking exercise, networking and feasting, while to the
over 7 billion people of the world any short of a concrete resolve is an international
catastrophe. For almost everywhere you
look, humanity’s greedy has destroyed the very fabric of existence. To many they have not risen beyond realizing the
correlation between human greed and the natural disasters unfolding and the
worse to come. Just like nations like Zimbabwe, although much of social misery
imaginable is a direct craft of the ZANU PF government, some still lampoon, ignorantly
blaming their gods and the Almighty, yet the solutions lies in human action and
not inaction, to have or to not have!Our world in statistics:
The cost of Climate Change to reach $20 trillion by 2100
Since 1990 annual losses attributed to Climate Change of $60
billion annually has been recorded
2005 alone contributed to $200 billion of damage
In the USA Hurricane Katrina costed $125 billion in economic
loss
The European heat wave in 2003 costed $15 billion in damages
Droughts, tsunami, floods and retreating glacier are other international
disasters proven to be worse than the aforementioned.
While there is a knowledge gap on what needs to be done and
what needs to be done, the world is in agreement that action needs to be done.
While developing world is well represented at the COP21, at least in theory,
the danger has always been that the right experts will not be accorded the
chance to forcefully argue the balance of power that exist in the global
context. People like Mugabe at 92 is in
attendance, he probably is going to sign declaration binding for the next 15
years, when he will be 107, another forage. Many of the developing world’s ills of pollution
and ecosystem challenges are as a result of the rich nations plundering and
exploiting corrupt licensing loopholes by rogue leadership.
In as far as 2012, Pfebve (2012:29), I argued forcefully, in
my book Social Justice and Food Security: A UN Global challenge in which I noted
the disparity;
“The impact of agriculture to social, economic and environmental
sector tend to be immediately felt and this is because food availability
entirely depend on it. There have been of late coordinated efforts by both
regional and international agencies to mitigate the effects of climate change
and policy formulation to effect a sustainable ecosystem. The UN has been
playing a leading role as Karlsson M. (2005) noted, “The World Summit on
Sustainable Development requested in its Johannesburg Plan of Implementation
that a new collaborative mechanism between United Nations agencies, programs
and institutions be formed” The collaboration among agencies is important as
agriculture is driven by many factors many of which give rise to trans-boundary
ecosystem effect. Thus energy, climate change, environmental degradation,
atmospheric changes and water source availability are all a key to a
sustainable agro industry.
While agriculture is a vast industry spanning many
sub-sectors such as livestock, cereal, fisheries, bio fuel and grain
production, the drivers are the same, land, water and optimum temperatures.
Sustainable agricultural production requires deployment of technology to
maximize outputs with minimum damage to the environment; such is the challenge
to the policy makers. As the World’s population reaches approximately 8.1
billion by 2025 UN (2006), so the demand for food grows. The International and
regional agencies must implement policies that use clean technologies to meet
the linear demographic change without unsustainable deforestation. The latter
is a sensitive issue given the fact that, developing countries, which produce
the bulk of the food consumed globally still live in abject poverty. They still
use fossil fuel thereby contributing to GHG emissions and global warming. The
deforestation in turn affect weather pattern and rainfall harvest. The poor
nations are unable to afford high tech equipment to improve yields at the rate
of population growth, as such; much of the agricultural production is through
small scale holder enterprise. Unless the richer nations under the auspices of
UN make provisions to fund the developing countries, the campaign efforts BBC
(2005), “Make poverty history” will translate into empty slogans. The efforts
by FAO, World Bank, IFAD and GATT in providing funding for agricultural planning
and implementation to government institutions must be accelerated, Agenda 21
(2004). Food security must be viewed as a global collective responsibility.
Policy makers must ensure that, small scale farmers are accessible to credit to
finance machinery, hybrid seeds and fertilizers to maximize agriculture
production. Only when these farmers realize equity will they be able to play
their part in sustainable development”
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