POLITICAL ECOLOGY

Political Ecology

30^th January 2011

Fomukong Julius Ntonibe

Msc Student   (ICTA) Universitat Autonoma De Barcelona.

1-World Water Crisis, Commodification And Unequal Global Distribution.

Introduction:

I will like to began this essay with a quotation from the United Nation,s World Water Development Reports Number 2: “Water, A Shared Responsibility”. According to the European Commission,s Water Framework Directive, water is not a commercial goods like any other, water is a heritage and we must protect it. However it is a short road from treating water as a complex entity ( in-terms of value and importance to nature and humanity) to turning it in to a commodity.

The question here is how did we move from regarding water in a complex way to turning it in to a commodity? It is believe world water supply on the planet is infinite. But this assumption is completely false considering that available fresh water amounts to less than one half of one percent of all the water on earth. The rest is sea water, or is frozen in the polar ice. Fresh water is renewable only by rainfall, at the rate of 40,000 to 50,000 cubic kilometers per year. Due to intensive urbanization, deforestation, water diversion and industrial farming, however, even this small finite source of fresh water is disappearing with the drying of the earth's surface; if present trends persist, the water in all river basins on every continent could steadily be depleted.

Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people on earth already lack access to fresh drinking water. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand for fresh water is expected to rise to 56 percent more than the amount that is currently available.

Commodification:

In conventional terms, it can be described as a process whereby goods and services which were formerly used for subsistence purposes are bought and sold in the market. “Capital has proven unable to grow by itself, by its own exploitation of labor and technical change” (Martinez Alier, 2004) therefore it needs the steady increase of materials and energy coming from outside the economic system relying on the transformation of nature into commodities, i.e. tradable goods. The commodification of water begins with public policy. Public policy must serve social ends, and in order to determine social ends, we must engage in a valuation process, treating water as a good that can be traded and marketed, thus giving a common metric. There is also an in-building of the economic of water, which comes from the Dublin principles and the notion that water falls freely; but pipes cost money.

Water crisis and Commodification Process :

As the water crisis intensifies, governments around the world - under pressure from transnational corporations - are advocating a radical solution: the privatization, commodification and mass diversion of water. Proponents say that such a system is the only way to distribute water to the world's thirsty. But, in fact, experience shows that selling water on the open market does not address the needs of poor, thirsty people. On the contrary, privatized water is delivered to those who can pay for it, such as wealthy cities and individuals and water-intensive industries, like agriculture and high-tech. As one resident of the high desert in New Mexico observed after his community's water had been diverted for use by the high-tech industry: "Water flows uphill to money." Meanwhile, the future of one of the earth's most vital resources is being determined by those who profit from its overuse and abuse. A handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank, are aggressively taking over the management of public water services in developing countries, dramatically increasing the price of water to local residents and profiting from the developing countries desperate search for solution to the water crisis. Examples are numerous especially serious is that of the Middle East were the King of Jordan threaten to go to war with Israel for controlling Jordan water supply.

The big question here is “should water be treated like any other tradable goods, with it use determined by market principles”?.

References;

1- Maude Barlow (2001). Blue Gold “The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply”

2- Sierra Club conservation policies 2003.

3-Stephen Diamond (2008). Water Ethics and Commodification of Fresh Water Resources.

2-Environmental Justice and Ecosystem Degradation.

Introduction.

Here i intend to highlights the relationship between the poor and ecosystem goods and services. While everyone is affected by ecosystem degradation, the poor suffer the harmful effects disproportionately. In fact, the disparities between the poor and rich have grown in recent decades. For instance, despite global increases in the amount of food available per capita, over 800 million people remain undernourished, and food production per capita has actually decreased in Sub-Saharan Africa. While water availability has increased in many regions of the world, half of the urban population in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean suffer from contaminated water and its burden of disease. Ecosystem degradation has very real human and financial costs. The burning of 10 million hectares of Indonesia’s forests in 1997-8 resulted in additional health care costs of US$9.3 billion and affected some 20 million people.

Need for Environmental Justice.

Robert Bullard (1999): “The environmental justice movement has basically redefined what environmentalism is all about. It basically says that the environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. And so we can't separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do”

Inaccessibility and loss of ecosystem are mostly suffered by the poor through privatization of formerly common resources. This is particular evident in countries were local communities dependent on small scale fishing for livelihood have seen their source of living converted in to large ship farming and other forms of aquaculture for export. This not explain the decline in inland and coastal fisheries but deprived the local poor communities from the source of proteins and income. This is particularly true in countries like Ecuador, Thailand, Honduras, Chile, Indonesia, The Philippines, Bangladesh and India. According to World Resource Institute Report (2005) the substantial degradation of ecosystems that is now occurring is a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. For many of the1.1billion people living in severe poverty, nature is a daily lifeline, an asset for those with few other material meaning. This is especially true for the rural poor, who comprise three-quarters of all poor households worldwide. Harvests from forests, fisheries, and farm fields are a primary source of rural income and a fall back when other sources of employment falter. But programs to reduce poverty often fail to account for the important link between environment and the livelihoods of the rural poor. As a consequence, the full potential of ecosystems as a wealth-creating asset for the poor not just a survival mechanism has yet to be effectively tapped. According to Robert Bullard, one of American most prominent Environmental Justice Movement Leader, “Environmental justice is not a social program, it's not affirmative

actions, its about justice, and until we get justice in environmental protection, justice in terms of enforcement of regulations, we will not even talk about achieving sustainable development or sustainability issues until we talk about justice”. The big question here is, “if humanity depends on it ecosystems environment for survival, who is responsible for it management and protection? Being rich or poor, we need to be sustainable in dealing with our ecosystems if we hope to achieved Millennium Development Goals”.

References;

1- World Resources (2005). The Wealth of the Poor Managing Ecosystems to Fight poverty in collaboration with UNDP, UNEP, World Bank.

2- World Resource Institute (2005) Ecosystems Degradation and the Poor.

3- Environmental Justice: An Interview with Robert Bullard (1999)

3- Political Ecology and the Global Climate Change Discourse.

Introduction.

Despite the debates concerning political ecology “refer to the social and political conditions surrounding the causes, experiences, and management of environmental problems” (e.g. Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Bryant, 1992; Greenberg and Park, 1994; Zimmerer, 2000) it understanding is of great importance if we are to address the present global climate change debate. Political ecology opens a conceptual management analysis and understanding taking in to consideration important aspects as Environmental Valuation, Natural Resource, Waste and Energy, Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice.

Applying Political Ecology to the Climate Change Debate.

Adaptation to Climate Change is not only a “response to climatic stimuli” (IPCC 2007) but it depends on Adaptive Governance, Environmental perception, Capacities, Knowledge which could only be possible through the application of political ecology concepts. Political ecology thus represents a particular approach to the study of peace and conflict, emphasizing the role of

inequality in access to wealth, and the natural resources upon which wealth is based, as one of the principle drivers of the interrelated dynamics of human discord and ecological degradation. A characteristic feature of political ecology analysis entails elucidation of the interconnection between the various stakeholders involved in a conflict at different levels or scales from the regional to the global and the local to the national that may underlie seemingly spatially bounded conflicts, as well as contestation among actors at each of these levels (Watts 2000). Central to the climate change debate is the way we construct environmental knowledge and only through political ecology concepts can we be able to construct an environmental knowledge particularly understanding the power relationships inherent therein. At such using political concept of Governmentality we can be able to address the following four key question (Scot & Sullivan, 2000:2);

i- Who currently holds power over influential narratives?

ii- How is this power employed and for what political purposes?

iii- What is the science that support these defined narratives?

iv- What are the ideals of the morality infusing these narratives and their supporting science?

From Rio to Cancun, citizen participation is a recurrent and democratically important issue in the ongoing debate about climate change. However, different meanings are ascribed to citizen participation in different contexts and discourses, ranging from top-down involvement to bottom-up engagement. Only through political ecology framework can this issue be address. Therefore understanding political ecology concepts is very necessary in analyzing and managing the global climate change debates for the good of humanity.

References;

1- Timothy Forsyth (2003). Critical Political Ecology; The Politics of Environmental Science.

2- The Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (2005).

3- Detlef et al. (2010). The Political Ecology of Climate Change in South Korea.

4- Peace & Conflict Review. Vol.5, Issue1 ISSN:1659-3995 (2010).

5- Anthony R. Turton (2001). The Construction of Knowledge and the Climate Change Debate: A Perspective from the Developing South.