Typically, the Scandinavian countries and Germany have set the example in the European renewables field. Yet lately, a Southern country - Portugal - has attracted attention after delivering its National Renewable Energy Action Plan to the European Commission this June.

Portugal has made dramatic changes in its energy policy over the last five years under the government of Prime Minister José Sócrates. The country's installed renewable energy capacity more than tripled between 2004 and 2009, from 1,220 megawatts (MW) to 4,307 MW, and renewables now represent roughly 36 percent of electricity consumed. Portugal currently ranks fourth in Europe in energy production from renewables.

Of course, Portugal benefits from favorable conditions for renewables: a strong wind resource, great hydropower, good tidal waves potential, and a high sunshine rate. After the country removed several dams in recent years, Sócrates' government has focused instead on wind power development, under most conditions the cheapest renewable energy source after hydropower. With more than 600-percent growth in wind energy production between 2004 and 2009, Portugal now ranks sixth in Europe in total installed capacity and third in capacity per capita, behind only Denmark and Spain. Some even expect Portugal to overtake its neighbor Spain in per-capita wind energy production as early as this year.

Additionally, Portugal is starting to exploit its solar potential. A photovoltaic (PV) power station located in Moura, operative since 2008 and expected to be fully completed by the end of 2010, will count among the world's largest solar farms. But despite a great progression of installed PV capacity in Portugal (from 1 MW in 2000 to 75 MW in 2009), solar power still lags far behind wind's installed capacity of 3,353 MW. Portugal also deploys other renewable energies, albeit at a much smaller scale. Biomass and biogas represented 3.2 percent of total consumed electricity in 2009, and the world's first shoreline wave power plant has been operating since 2005 on the island of Pico in the Azores, with 400 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of capacity.

How did Portugal assume such impressive leadership in the clean energy transition? The key, as usual, lies in ambitious supportive policies. Prior to 2000, Portugal's transmission lines were owned by private power companies that had no interest in investing in renewables, as the deployment of these technologies would require radical changes in the grid infrastructure and therefore raise costs. To address this barrier, the government bought the lines and began adapting the grid to renewables requirements, including more flexibility and a better grid connection in remote areas to allow the production and distribution of electricity from small generators, such as domestic solar panels.

A combination of incentives was implemented to attract investors. Feed-in tariffs (FIT) - which guarantee producers of renewable energy a specified price for every megawatt-hour of power fed into the grid - were first introduced in Portugal in 1988 and have increasingly evolved into a highly sophisticated system with individual prices for each renewable energy source. The latest tariff stipulations, issued in 2005 and 2007, take into account environmental considerations, the level of technology development, and the inflation rate. The government also integrated new technologies such as Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) and tidal power into the system.

Today, all renewable energy sources in Portugal wil benefit from the feed-in tariff for 15 years, and small hydropower prices are guaranteed for 20 years. The tariffs vary from around 7.5 Euro cents (around 9.5 U.S. cents) per kWh for wind and hydro to more than 30 Euro cents (38 U.S. cents) per kWh for photovoltaic energy. Renewable heating and cooling is also supported under conditions by financial and fiscal incentives, largely for the benefit of small and medium-sized enterprises.

The European Commission plays a decisive role in setting targets for each Member State via its 2009 Renewable Energy Directive. Portugal is expected to reach a 31-percent share of renewable energy in its gross final energy consumption by 2020. Also, the European Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) encourages participating countries to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases and therefore move from fossil fuels to renewables, by requiring energy producers and energy-intensive companies to meet strict carbon dioxide emissions targets and to purchase additional permits for overshooting them.

 According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Portugal became a net power exporter last year, delivering a small amount of electricity to Spain. Inspired by these good results, Portugal set more ambitious targets in its National Energy Strategy (ENE 2020), adopted by the Council of Ministers on April 15. The country now aims to reach a 45-percent renewables share in its electricity production by the end of the year, and a 60-percent share by 2020.

The main focus of Portugal's renewable policy will remain on wind power, a dynamic industry that represents a source of revenue and creates green jobs. The electricity operator Energias de Portugal even invests in wind farms located in the U.S. Midwest.

Prime Minister Jose Socrates' government wants to improve the reliability and efficiency of Portugal's renewables supply. Renewable energy production is often challenged by natural flows-including the common criticism that the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, even in Portugal. By the end of the year, the government will set up a system to monitor on-going energy demand and potential supply from various available renewable sources.

What is driving Portugal to undertake such changes? One factor, of course, is the fact that the country does not possess any noteworthy fossil fuel resources, as illustrated by 2007 IEA data. Yet in 2005, the bulk of Portugal's gross electricity was generated by three fossil sources: coal (32.7%), natural gas (29.2%), and oil (18.9%). The country is therefore heavily dependent on imports that place a high toll on the national budget - amounting to 86 percent of spending in 2006, according to the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC). In its ENE 2020 strategy, Portugal aims to reduce fossil fuel imports 70 percent by 2020 and cut its energy import balance 25 percent, saving some US$2.55 billion.

In order to address initial local conflicts due to the financial costs of intense development of wind power plants, a unique mechanism has been set up. Under the current feed-in tariff legislation, municipalities that host wind farms benefit from additional financial support in the form of a 2.5-percent share of the monthly remuneration paid to local wind project operators.

Overall, the IEA's Shinji Fujino tells the New York Times, "So far, the [renewable energy] program has placed no stress on the national budget."

Alexander Ochs is director of the Climate and Energy program at the Worldwatch Institute and Camille Serre is a research intern with Worldwatch. They can be reached at aochs@worldwatch.org.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog ReVolt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

Postcards of Hope and Success from Africa

Worldwatch Researcher Visits 150th Project, After 21 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Lomé, Togo-Highlighting Africa-led innovations that offer sustainable ways to alleviate hunger and poverty, Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Danielle Nierenberg visited her 150th site today as part of a one-year tour through Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Niger, Madagascar, and 17 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The research-driven itinerary, part of Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project, will culminate in the January 2010 release of the Institute's flagship publication, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

About 120 kilometers outside Lomé, Togo, Nierenberg reached this exciting benchmark while spending the day visiting conservation projects with a local organization called "Les Compagnons Ruraux," which is working with communities living in or near the rain forest to help them practice sustainable agriculture and prevent deforestation. Other projects that Danielle has visited to date include: 

• School garden and nutrition projects in Senegal and Uganda that produce healthy food for children while instilling pride in local cultivation practices and a taste for indigenous vegetables;
• Pastoralists in Kenya who are working to keep both their livestock biodiversity and their cultural traditions alive;
• Women-run co-operatives and value-added projects in Ghana that improve livelihoods, empower women, and help them face challenges together;
• Farmer-to-farmer trainings in Mozambique that help farmers share their experiences while valuing and investing in their own local knowledge;
• Zulu sheep and indigenous breed protection projects in South Africa that preserve the pest-tolerant and drought-resistant animals that are being replaced by exotic and foreign species.

"The news media in the West tends to be very negative in its coverage of Africa," says Nierenberg. "We often hear stories about conflict, HIV/AIDS, famine, and disease. But there are stories of hope, too. Everywhere I travel on the continent, I see examples of Africa-led innovations that are succeeding in reducing hunger and poverty where past approaches have not worked. Nourishing the Planet seeks to shed light on these solutions."

Nierenberg is reporting daily from farms, co-ops, and offices in Africa, posting updates on the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet blog. In addition, she has co-authored dozens of op-eds throughout her travels-often co-written with African innovators-in media outlets that include USA Today, The Seattle Times, the Ghana Daily Graphic, and South Africa's Cape Town Argus.

"Nourishing the Planet represents a new research paradigm for Worldwatch," says Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin. "The on-the-ground examples featured in State of the World 2011 will demonstrate the success of sustainability innovations in agriculture to policymakers, consumers, and the donor community worldwide."

The State of the World 2011 report will focus on agriculture innovations and will be accompanied by derivative materials including briefing documents, summaries, an innovations database, videos, and podcasts. The project's findings will be disseminated to a wide range of influential agricultural stakeholders, including government ministries, agricultural policymakers, farmer and community networks, and the increasingly influential non-governmental environmental and development communities.

"One of the main goals of the project is to create a roadmap for the funding and donor communities to ensure that the increasing amount of agricultural funding in Africa goes to projects that are effective and long-lasting even without outside support," says Brian Halweil, co-project director of Nourishing the Planet. "In addition, a local innovation working in rural Cameroon might be something that could be scaled up or replicated in Zambia. We hope to connect projects in different regions and help to improve knowledge sharing."

Dena Hoff is a farmer and activist in eastern Montana, where she has raised sheep, cattle, alfalfa, and corn with her husband since 1979. Hoff is the North America coordinator for La Via Campesina-the "international movement of peasants"-as well as vice president of the National Family Farm Coalition and former chair of the Northern Plans Resource Council. 

La Via Campesina has been credited with coining the term "food sovereignty." Can you describe what this means and how your work supports and promotes it?

Food sovereignty is about a system of agriculture where people get to decide their own food and agricultural policies in their own countries, without being dictated by foundations or institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or trade agreements. People decide what they're going to eat, who's going to produce it, and what's going to be produced. More than that, it's a whole life system that is sustainable, that respects Mother Earth, and that respects human rights and the rights of people to live in dignity, to be well-fed, to be reasonably taken care of,  and to have a decent standard of living. Everything that food sovereignty encompasses is human rights, women's rights, and education; everything that makes a good life and protects the planet.

Via Campesina is a very large social movement. We're not a legal entity at all, but we are made up of groups around the world. We think that we have as many as 300 million members, though we've never been able to get a direct number. We're growing, growing, growing because people realize that we can only change the world into a place where everybody can live and a world where everybody wants to live by banding together, standing together, sharing each other's stories, and showing solidarity. We need to educate people: people who are not farmers but who, of course, are eaters, people who care about the environment, people who care about human rights and social justice and the environment-they need to be part of this movement. It's going to take everyone.

There are too few people who control the power, who control the resources, who control the wealth of the world, and the destiny of the rest of us. I don't like anybody pulling my strings. I am not a puppet. I am an independent human being, and I have wishes and dreams and fears for my own family, my children, my grandchildren, my nieces, my nephews, my community. And I want to see these things become reality, and I'm willing to just keep working forever.

The biggest part of that responsibility is educating other people and getting them to stand up to power, and that's a very difficult thing. People do not like conflict; people do not like to stand up to power. They have some idea that the people who are in power are smarter than they are and have something that they don't have-if only they knew that those people who are controlling their lives are just ordinary people!

Until we give people the confidence to take back control of their own lives and their communities, nothing is going to change. It's a big, big, task. But it should hearten people to know that there are millions and millions of people around the world who are very dedicated to doing this, and who are willing to do it.

What role does gender play in La Via Campesina's work?

Gender is extremely important, because most of the world's farmers are women. And a lot of those women are hungry women because they are the people who are being forced off land. They have no access to resources and no access to credit. We started a campaign in Mozambique at our Fifth International Assembly against violence against women, so we have that international campaign, and the young people have just taken it up. They have put on plays and they have dramas and they are doing literature and they are going around to communities and educating people on why it is so important that women have an equal voice, equal rights, and equal opportunities.

Gender balance is very important to us. There will never be any real equity in the world until women are seen as equal partners, standing shoulder to shoulder with men. One of our original seven pillars was gender. We also fought very hard in 2000 for gender parity on our coordinating committee, and we got it-we have a male and a female for each of the assigned regions. We have a lot of programs in a lot of countries for training women: in agriculture, in literacy, and also in political training, so that they have an understanding of what's impacting their lives. We also have programs that help them develop means of making a living, so it's very important.

What are some of the similarities between what's happening to agriculture across the world and what's happening here in the U.S.?

I belong to the Northern Plains Resource Council-that's my state organization in Montana. They have, for years, been trying to protect family agriculture, educate people about its importance, and protect it from energy developers and speculators. The National Family Farm Coalition has been involved since 1987 in policy work in Washington, D.C., trying to get a decent Farm Bill so that we can protect our family agriculture. But when you go lobby, you hear, "We don't need American farmers. We can import everything cheaper." Congressmen will actually say that to you.

My question has always been: If transportation, communication,  and energy are a matter of national security, shouldn't food be a matter of national security? Shouldn't water be a matter of national security? Instead, it's just a commodity for someone to make money.

Land grabs happen in this country, too. In my neighborhood, groups of bankers or lawyers or investors are investing in farmland because I guess they think they're going to get a better return than on some other thing. And farmers have no recourse. I mean, no one here who wanted to expand or who wanted to help one of their children get started in agriculture, they can't possibly match those prices. The land is lost for agriculture. A great big and lovely farming ranch along the Yellowstone River went to a real-estate developer from Maryland who's now running for the legislature in Montana. Land is being turned into hunting or fishing places or little retreats. It's not being used for agriculture.

Look at what's happening in Detroit. They have torn down about 40 buildings in downtown  Detroit. They're going to tear down about that many more. And there are a lot of vacant lots that can be used for urban agriculture. But, there's a big developer who wants to commercialize it for profits instead of the city giving the lots over to the community for urban farming. That's land grabbing, isn't it?

Why are large-scale land acquisitions, or land grabs, problematic?

It's problematic because there are a lot of places where land is owned communally, or there's not a deed to the land, and it's just land that communities have made their living with, in some places for over 1,000 years, maybe more. And suddenly, this has a value beyond somebody's livelihood, beyond somebody having to have food and shelter. And someone finds out they can make a profit, and they come in and take it.

Mali has put food sovereignty in their constitution. Their president leases large amounts of arable land to the Saudis for 10 years. That's totally against the constitution-it's totally illegal-but there doesn't seem to be a national or international mechanism to force governments to abide by their own laws and their own constitutions. It just seems like increasingly the world is a more lawless place, where anything goes if it makes money.

How does global agriculture and trade policy affect the environment, global hunger, and poverty?

We had all the hype about how industrial agriculture was going to end hunger, how GMOs were going to end hunger, and look what's happened: there are a billion hungry people, almost  half a million of those are in the United States. Hunger is increasing, poverty is increasing, and all of the industrialization hasn't done one single thing to end hunger, and we've been destroying the environment. So the solution actually turned out to be very, very damaging-far more damaging than the problems that we had before industrial agriculture was proposed as the solution to hunger and the environment.

Look at the deforestation for biofuels in Brazil, the destruction of traditional agriculture in Indonesia in favor of palm plantations for biofuels. Shoving people off the land and forcing them to the cities where there are no livelihoods is not the solution. Or forcing them to become slaves as is happening all over the world. We like to think that we're in the 21st century, and slavery is something of the past. It isn't. It's worse. It's getting worse every day. There are so many examples of people being forced into slavery, literally having their livelihoods taken away from them because somebody else wants to make a profit off of the resources that they made a modest living with. And then, if they wish to survive, they can become practically slave labor for these people who just took away their livelihood. If that's not slavery, I don't know what the definition is.

Do you think there's any role for multinational corporations to play in improving the situation for farmers and peasants here and across the world?

I'm not sure that's the role they want. Their mission is their bottom line, to pay dividends to their investors. Their mission is not to do good. Their mission is not to protect the environment or nurture societies. They're doing what they're set up to do, and they've been given far too many rights and too much power.  Equal protection under the law for a corporation? A friend of mine who was inside [the corporate world] used to say, "What kind of craziness is that?" Corporations have no soul to save and no ass to kick and they are totally unaccountable to anyone.

What happens when they do something ugly that causes people to lose their lives? If I would do something accidentally like kill someone in a traffic accident, that would be manslaughter, I would be brought up on charges, I would have to suffer the consequences. You don't really hear about anyone in a corporation having to take responsibility for the lives they cause to be lost through their greed and negligence. They have the same protection as any individual, but I guess they don't have the same responsibility.

How could agencies like the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization do a better job to support La Via Campesina's mission?

They could do a better job by ensuring that people in countries that need food aid have access to means of production, so they can feed themselves and not rely on charity-to make them self-reliant. Education, condemning the privatization of water, health care-the poorest people don't get those basic things, and they don't get basic services because they simply can't pay. There's all this hype about corporations being able to produce more, but producing more is not the answer. You can go to the markets in the poorest countries and you can see mountains of food, and people are starving to death right nearby. If they have no means to a livelihood, they have no means to feed themselves, and they have no means to make a living, then they can't buy food. There can be all the extra food in the world, but if they don't have money, they die.

How can people get involved to help La Via Campesina's efforts?

We  always need people to hook up with our organizations in all of our countries and support legislation in those countries that will turn governments around, so they do the right thing for civil society and are not totally governed by corporations. We have six organizations in the U.S. that belong to Via Campesina. And we're always looking for people who can help with translation.

We want people to take an interest in the policies of their own countries, in the plight of family agriculture, family fishermen, migrant workers and landless workers, and get educated about what these people face. And also how it impacts you! Because even if you think you are isolated and insulated from all the trouble that's happening, it impacts everybody because everybody eats. Everybody eats!

If there are only huge massive plantations producing our food with basically slave labor, if workers have no rights, if the environment is just sneered at (because no one enforces environmental laws), if human rights are not protected, and if people are not well paid and allowed to be brought into the country illegally or otherwise and then just dumped if they're injured or hurt, that does not reflect very well on us as a society or as people, especially for those of us who like to be called "good Christians."

So much of La Via Campesina's work is about mobilizing people. What agricultural or economic policies do you think could be implemented to address the needs of small-scale farmers and agricultural producers in order to help create the change you envision?

Certainly a decent Farm Bill with a farmer-owned reserve, and a Farm Bill that actually gives farmers a price so that they can live and support their communities. It isn't just about farmers. The money they make supports an entire community, our states. And I think people need to understand the importance of agriculture to this country, and what happens to countries that let their agriculture go and depend on importing all their food from somewhere else. There are plenty of examples in the world of countries that can no longer feed themselves because somebody decided it was cheaper or more intelligent to buy all their food from somebody else.

Everybody has to become an activist, even if it's just educating themselves. Even if it's just making a phone call or planting a garden, or looking around and seeing if your neighbors are one of the one-in-eight people who are hungry. Be aware of what's going on around you!

Ronit Ridberg is a research intern with the Worldwatch Institute. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about the fight for food sovereignty in industrialized and developing nations.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org. 

The following op-ed originally appeared in The Charleston Gazette.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- If you drive just a few miles out of Charleston you'll see fields cleared for livestock and agriculture, mountaintops blasted for mining, and the Kanawha forest in its own safely protected area. But what you won't see is all of these elements of nature working together.

While a few farmers in the United States might plant trees around fields to prevent wind erosion, most clear fields of trees for grazing or planting. In Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, and many other countries across sub-Saharan Africa, however, farmers are planting trees along with crops to help conserve and clean water and air, build up soils, provide feed for livestock, and -- perhaps most importantly -- increase yields and incomes.

Agroforestry, a land management practice that integrates trees with crops, is a simple approach that has been used by farmers for generations. Trees play a crucial role in both rural and urban environment by providing food, shade, livestock fodder, fuel and medicinal ingredients. They also hold soil in place, regulate water flows, and improve both quality of life and incomes. Despite its enormous potential, agroforestry has often been overlooked by commercial farmers, development agencies and funders in favor of "higher-tech" ways of increasing yields.

Organizations like the World Agroforestry Centre are trying to reverse this trend. Researchers are working with farmers on agroforestry projects that will help improve food supplies and nutrition in some of the world's poorest, most malnourished countries and also position farms on the front lines of combating climate change. The Centre is located in Nairobi, Kenya, though you wouldn't know it from the surroundings. It sits on a lush campus, thick with vegetation, offering a quiet oasis away from a city of racing matatus and ubiquitous pollution.

The Centre is hoping to help farmers respond to the many challenges they face -- low use of agricultural inputs, degraded soils and food insecurity -- through what they call "Evergreen Agriculture." The growing of nitrogen fixing trees, including the indigenous Faidherbia albida, along with maize or in rotations have succeeded in improving soils, raising productivity and reducing costs for farmers.

More than a million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are planting or nurturing natural re-growth of leguminous trees and shrubs in conjunction with crops, in many cases doubling or tripling yields of cereal crops. The agroforestry systems reduce the need for expensive mineral fertilizers and actually increase the effectiveness of the small amounts of fertilizer that farmers can afford.

Dr. Dennis Garrity, the Centre's Director General, hypothesizes that although the Evergreen Agriculture system is still undergoing research and development, it may increase maize yields and provide greater household food security, while significantly reducing the smallholders labor and lowering overall investment in maize production. "We also have evidence," he said, "that it will improve drought resilience and increase above and below ground carbon sequestration as well." This is an increasingly important component of any agricultural system as the effects of climate change become more evident in sub-Saharan Africa and across the globe.

Agriculture is the human endeavor that will be most affected by climate change. But agriculture, livestock grazing and forestry -- responsible for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions -- is the only near-term option for large-scale greenhouse gas sequestration.

Agroforestry, which reduces erosion and enriches soils with organic matter, when combined with other environmentally sustainable agriculture practices, could offset one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, while also increasing yields.

Nature's own approach, strengthened by science, provides many benefits. Agroforestry is one method that could provide the kind of efficiency we need to strengthen rural communities, like those in West Virginia and Africa, improve livelihoods, rebuild ecosystems, fight climate change, and help alleviate global hunger. The mountains and fields of West Virginia have given us so much, maybe it's time to put something back in.

Place is an economist and head of impact assessment for the World Agroforestry Center.  Nierenberg is a senior researcher with the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C writing from Africa at NourishingthePlanet.com.

France has passed a major new bill that will deeply transform the country's environmental laws, including its approach to climate change. But while the outcomes of the measure are promising, a variety of criticisms remain.

After an exhausting legislative process, the "Grenelle de l'Environnement," named after the so-called "negotiations of Grenelle" on wages that took place in 1968, ended with the adoption of the "Grenelle 2" bill this May. Enacted on July 13, three years after the process was launched by then-newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy, the new legislation covers environmental topics such as climate and energy, biodiversity protection, public health, sustainable agriculture, waste management, and the governance of sustainable development. In addition to being a comprehensive environmental bill, Grenelle 2 implicitly defines the French sustainable development strategy for years to come.

The original Grenelle de l'environnement left France paralyzed by a general strike. Back then, the primary negotiators were the government, unions, and employers. In 2007, the Grenelle de l'environnement extended the consultation to five main stakeholder groups-the State, employers, unions, environmental NGOs, and local governments-to bring it more in line with the participatory nature of sustainable development.

On the climate front, France is likely to meet its current emissions reduction goals. The country has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and as a member of the European Union it must work with other member countries to achieve an average emissions reduction of 8 percent by 2012. Because French emissions have been low due to the extensive use of nuclear energy, the country has only to stabilize its emissions at 1990 levels. However, the European Union has more ambitious reduction goals for the post-Kyoto period (starting in 2013). In 2008, it set a target of reducing region-wide emissions 20 percent by 2020, and it is now considering increasing this goal to 30 percent.

Moreover, as one of the G8 countries who have agreed to cut their emissions 80 percent by 2050, France is being challenged internationally to curb its emissions beyond current goals. At the domestic level, the country's programmatic energy strategic law of July 13, 2005 sets a target of reducing national emissions 3 percent per year, resulting in a projected division of emissions by four by 2050 - so called "Factor 4."

To help achieve these commitments, Grenelle 2 includes various measures that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, it contains incentives to embed sustainability into French urban planning: so-called urban master plans (Schéma de Cohérence Territoriale) will be finalized before 2017 to enhance policy coherence between urban, industrial, farming, tourism, and natural zones, and also to help tackle urban sprawl. Grenelle 2 also allows for a possible exception for energy-efficient buildings to the Building Density Limit (COS), which specifies the maximum building density of a landed property allowed, by acreage. In general, Grenelle 2 makes great improvements regarding the energy efficiency of buildings. Currently, emissions from buildings account for around 18 percent of French greenhouse gas emissions.

The new law sets a target of reducing the average energy consumption of buildings nearly 40 percent by 2020, and puts a focus on advanced energy performance for both old and new buildings. New buildings built after 2012 are to consume less than 50 kilowatts per square meter, and those built after 2020 must be "energy positive," producing more energy than they consume. As of 2013, old buildings must be renovated at a rate of 400,000 buildings per year, with the renovation of public buildings starting before the end of 2012. Through this means, the government aims to reduce the energy consumption of public buildings by at least 40 percent and to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2020.

Additionally, as of 2012, renters of real estate must be informed about the energy performance of their buildings so that they can make energy costs part of their decision to rent a place or not. The transport sector is responsible for about 25 percent of French greenhouse gas emissions, making it essential to support alternatives to fossil fuel-powered vehicles. Grenelle 2 provides for a clarification of the capacities of local governments and pushes for the further development of public transportation schemes. It also encourages local governments to follow their European neighbors (among others London and Milan) by implementing urban tolls for cities of more than 300,000 inhabitants. Alternatives to conventional means of transportation are being encouraged as well, including self-service bike rental stations (such as Velib in Paris or Velo'v in Lyon) and car sharing, fostered by the creation of a new "label" that establishes standards and that will be set by decree. Grenelle 2 also aims to encourage the use and maintenance of hybrid and electric vehicles as well as the necessary infrastructure to power them.

In the renewables sector, Grenelle 2 sets a goal that 23 percent of France's energy use must come from a mix of renewable energy sources by 2020-most likely from hydropower (the nation's largest renewables source so far), wind power, and biomass. The law calls for regional climate and energy mapping to assess climate-related risks within the country as well as to determine domestic energy needs, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Consequently, adaptation strategies and monitoring instruments will be developed. In addition, local and regional authorities that are responsible for 50,000 inhabitants or more, as well as companies with over 500 employees, will be required to conduct emissions assessments.

The law also promotes electricity produced by renewable sources through the enhancement of various supporting tools. France's largest utility company, EdF, is already required to purchase electricity produced by certain renewable energy generators. Under Grenelle 2, local governments can also benefit from this purchase guarantee if they produce electricity from renewable sources. Moreover, any individual can now install photovoltaic panels at home and benefit from a "feed-in tariff" that guarantees producers of renewable energy a specified price for every megawatt-hour of power fed into the grid. To improve conditions for renewables, the electricity grid will be strengthened and enhanced in the coming years.

While all of these measures will likely help advance investments in renewable energy, particularly for solar technologies, Grenelle 2 imposes several barriers for the expansion of wind power, despite the creation of regional wind energy development schemes.

For one, windmills taller than 50 meters will now be subject to the same burdensome administrative procedures as other industrial facilities, under the so-called regulations "classifying facilities for environmental purposes" (ICPE). Also, although one of the advantages of renewable energy is to allow for decentralized, local energy production, only farms with at least five windmills will be granted a building permit. In effect, this will keep small-scale consumers such as famers from producing their own energy.

Furthermore, windmill implementation will be subject to zoning. Windmills must be at least 500 meters away from any area "designated for housing" - which includes not only sites inhabited today, but also those that might be developed in the future. Finally, wind companies are required to set aside financial warrants from the start of the construction for land restoration in the event that the windmill is later removed.

With the passing of Grenelle 2, the French government had hoped to build a reputation as a green economy pioneer. One of the great improvements is that the law shifts the focus from national energy security (which historically has paved the way for nuclear energy in France) to energy efficiency. Also, the Grenelle de l'Environnement will deeply transform the view of French environmental law as a whole, so that it is no longer restricted to strictly environmental issues ruled by the so-called Code de l'Environnement - the compilation of all environment-related legislation. For example, by amending the Urban Planning Code, Grenelle 2 marks a shift away from environmental regulation and toward a broader sustainable development agenda.

Nevertheless, much criticism abounds. Most significantly, the measures pose considerable challenges for wind power development. As such, they represent a serious obstacle to reaching France's ambitious renewable energy targets and to making a quick transition to a low-carbon economy.

In July 2009, the French Parliament nearly unanimously adopted the Grenelle 1 bill, outlining the Grenelle de l'Environnement's general commitments and goals. In contrast, when the Grenelle 2 went before parliament earlier this year, there wasn't much of a consensus. Expectations were high at first, but later led to considerable frustration among many environmentalists. Some stakeholders even left the negotiations; the organization "Sortir du nucléaire" (Out of Nuclear), for example, pulled out fairly early once it became clear that nuclear power would remain at the core of France's energy strategy. Likewise, the Hulot Foundation abandoned the consultation process in March 2010 shortly after the government renounced establishing a carbon tax.

Despite these tensions, the government decided to apply "accelerated proceedings" to the deliberations, which gave the National Assembly, the lower house of France's bicameral parliament, only 30 hours in May to review some 1,600 amendments. Unlike in the United States, where conservatives dominate the opposition to a climate bill, in France, liberals and ecologists voted against the bill drafted by Sarkozy's conservative party because they were concerned about its lack of coherence with more ambitious goals and with the President's early promise of fostering a "green revolution." Despite this resistance, however, the bill passed because the government's party held a majority of seats in the Assembly.

Two final observations can help to illuminate Grenelle's outcomes. First, most of French environmental law has its origin at the European level. With Grenelle 2, France transposed many EU directives into French law, including the European Commission's climate and energy package for 2020 that aims at a 20 percent share of renewables, a 20 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, and energy efficiency improvements of 20 percent. With this corresponding relationship, it seems like Grenelle 2 will enable France to keep up with Europe's ambitious environmental goals.

Alexander Ochs is director of the Climate and Energy program at the Worldwatch Institute and Camille Serre is a research intern with Worldwatch. They can be reached at aochs@worldwatch.org.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog ReVolt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

What does it take to confront climate change and put the economy on a more sustainable footing? Topping the list are measures like promoting renewable energy, boosting the efficiency with which we use all sources of energy, making our communities denser to allow for greater public transit, putting a price on carbon-all no-brainers.

A recent macroeconomic analysis by the Center for Climate Strategies once again re-affirmed the potential yet to be fulfilled. It found that a portfolio of two dozen energy and climate policy actions could cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 27 percent below 1990 levels by 2020-even without congressional action.

And yet, it is increasingly clear that an approach that focuses principally on new technologies - coupled with a reliance on market mechanisms-is liable to fall tragically short. What the United States and all societies need is a broader strategy that incorporates the social dimensions of sustainability and makes the economy work for both the planet and people.

Last week, my colleague Gary Gardner observed that in economically gut-wrenching times politicians all too easily use fear as a powerful tool to thwart actions intended to fundamentally overhaul the way economies work. When people can barely hold on to a job, they are in no mood for open-ended experiments. When-as has happened in the United States for the past three decades-real wages stagnate even as the cost of education, health, and just about everything else keeps rising, then policies that revolve around the central idea of making energy more expensive are easily suspect. When people are in danger of losing their homes, they can be expected to resist additional uncertainty-and perhaps to fall prey to those who falsely charge that environmental action will be ruinous.

Those who argue that we can't afford better environmental protections are often fervent disciples of the dogma of free markets. It is ironic that large parts of the U.S. environmental community have allowed themselves to be so seduced by the siren song of the market-only to find that conservative politicians are using the severe economic crisis caused by laissez-faire policies as an effective tool to oppose environmentalists' most cherished goals.

The economic crisis has taught us that unfettered markets can undermine social and economic stability. Why would one expect radically different outcomes in the environmental field? It is time for a new brand of environmentalism - one that unreservedly embraces social goals and ideals as much as ecological ones, and that dares to question whether market forces are always the best tool to rely on. Good wages are as critical as renewable energy standards, and job creation and security need to receive as much priority as a cap on carbon does.

To some extent this requires a dose of the much-maligned "command-and-control" approach that was behind environmentalism's early successes. But, as we have argued on the Green Economy blog, the naked economic fear that now drives destructive political processes and blocks progress toward sustainability can ultimately only be overcome with an injection of greater economic democracy. Only when people feel that they have a tangible degree of control over their economic lives can they be expected to back the far-reaching-and somewhat scary-changes that are needed to avoid full-blown climate change and other environmental calamities.

Michael Renner is a senior fellow with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at mrenner@worldwatch.org.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog Green Economy. For permission to republish this report, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

 
In Kenya, a devastating cycle of drought and flood reflects the worst that climate change has to offer. These and other more insiduous impacts of warming temperatures threaten the health and survival of the nation's poorest and most at-risk inhabitants, namely women and children.

The average yearly income in Kenya is less than US$1,000, 60 percent of the population is below poverty level, and one-fifth of children under the age of five are malnourished. Already, the nation has experienced at least 28 cycles of drought in the last century, as well as 15 floods of epidemic proportions, according to Mahboub Maalim, Executive Secretary of the Inter Governmental Authority on Development.

Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta is attempting to address the disparity between an expanding population and the nation's reduced ability to produce food by providing 32 billion Kenyan shillings ($40 million) for agricultural and rural development projects and 51 billion shillings ($63 million) for environmental programs, including water and sanitation infrastructure upgrades.

But in fact, money - and even agricultural techniques based on Western agriculture - may not be the answer. As Allan Savory, founder of the Zimbabwe-based Africa Center for Holistic Management, points out, these approaches typically involve the use of synthetic fertilizers, stronger pesticides, and genetically modified seeds to increase yields-all tactics that view soil as a "problem" to be solved rather than as a resource that offers its own unique opportunities, and requires its own special treatment.

For Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, a horticultural scientist, teacher, and researcher at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology, the real problem with using Western agricultural methods in Kenya is the loss of the superb diversity that once made indigenous plants a reliable and nutritious native food source. "Of the approximately 200 indigenous species of plants that were used by Kenyans as vegetables in the past, most were either collected in the wild, semi-cultivated, or cultivated. Now many are either unknown or extinct," Abukutsa-Onyango said.

What both Savory and Abukutsa-Onyango want is a long-term solution that uses the tools at hand, including the marginal, arid soil of Kenya's lowlands, to effect a lasting revolution in regional agriculture.

Savory calls this a "Brown Revolution," and Abukutsa-Onyango calls it an "indigenous food" revolution. Both are dedicated to seeing Kenyan agriculture survive, not as some protected but unmanageable offshoot of Western monocultural crop techniques, but as the sort of traditional approach to food production that operated before Europeans intervened.

To that end, Abukutsa-Onyango has reintroduced such varieties as African nightshade and vegetable amaranth to regional farmers, and set up a system to put them back into the marketplace.

"To date, we have about 100 contact farmers and/or farmer groups-77 in Western Kenya and 33 in Central Kenya-who are trained in all aspects of growing indigenous crops, from seed production to processing, using organic methods," she said. "The farmers that do well are also taught simple food preservation techniques like drying, which increase shelf-life but retain as much of the nutrients as possible, and are linked to supermarkets to sell their vegetables. Because of their extensive training, they are able to pass on their knowledge of indigenous food growing to others in their communities."

These native foods, after years of being spurned as suitable only in starvation times, and only for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, have spurred a cottage industry aimed at simultaneously reducing poverty and improving the diet of Kenya's approximately 6.5 million children.

But Abukutsa-Onyango is not one-sided in her arguments. While she foresees the hot, arid lowlands being used for indigenous crops such as bambara nuts, she is not averse to using the cool, damp highlands to grow cash crops. "For example, indigenous bambara nuts and pigeon pea yield relatively better in low fertility soils and with low rainfall, compared with beans," she notes. "And this allows a diversified, sustainable production model that insures nutritional security and prosperity."

About one thing, however, Abukutsa-Onyango is adamant: "I don't believe we can address the issues of nutrition security, poverty, and health in Kenya without relying on African indigenous crops. With a soaring food crisis, and maize harvests predicted to be 16 percent below former years as a result of changing Kenyan weather patterns, the only grains that could adequately replace maize in my opinion would be indigenous millets and sorghum, which are more drought tolerant."

Professor Mary's solution, which suggests harmony with nature rather than an attempt to control it, may be the only way forward in a warming world, not just for Africa but for the globe.

Jeanne Roberts is a freelance writer based in Minnesota. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about the role of indigenous crops in sustainable agriculture.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org. 

The following op-ed originally appeared in the Vancouver Sun.

Eating organic and local produce from the Trout Lake, West End, Main Street and Kitsilano farmers' markets and others around Vancouver is becoming the norm, rather than just a trend among wealthy foodies.

Over the past 15 years, the number of farmers' markets in the U.S. and Canada has tripled, and consumers are more concerned about where and how their food is raised.

In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, local foods are looked down on by rich and poor shoppers alike. In Senegal many consumers and cooks consider local rice to be inferior and instead buy imported European brands that can cost four times as much.

And outside Kampala, Uganda, young people consider agricultural work a punishment -- something they'll be forced to do if they can't find a job in the city or go to university.

In the United States and Canada and all over Africa, decreased consumption of locally produced foods has led to a weakened local economy, rising poverty levels and health problems.

But our eating isn't the only problem. At the heart of these issues is a loss of knowledge about agricultural practices and indigenous varieties that create local agricultural, as well as cultural, biodiversity. While what we eat is important, what may be even more essential over the long term is understanding how to plant, grow, cook, and eat food.

In Mukono District, Edward Mukiibi, 23, Slow Food Mukono convivium leader, and Roger Serunjogi, 22, built Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) with this premise in mind. The project began in 2006 as a way to improve nutrition, generate environmental awareness and preserve food traditions and culture for Mukono students by establishing school gardens at 15 preschool, day and boarding schools.

By teaching kids early about growing, preparing and eating indigenous and traditional vegetables and fruit, they hope to cultivate the next generation of farmers and eaters who can preserve Uganda's culinary traditions and increase food security. Over the past few years, DISC has received global attention for its work and now is partly funded by Slow Food International.

By focusing on school gardens, Mukiibi and Serunjogi are not only helping to feed children, but also to revitalize an interest in -- and cultivation of -- African indigenous vegetables.

The schools don't use hybrid seeds, but rely on what is locally available. Students and teachers at DISC project schools are taught how to save seed from local varieties of amaranth, sumiwiki, maize, African eggplant and other local crops, to grow in school gardens. DISC is establishing a seed bank, according to Mukiibi, "to preserve the world's best vegetables."

Thanks to DISC, students no longer see agriculture as a last resort, but rather as a way to make money, help their communities and preserve biodiversity.

Similarly, in Dakar, Senegal, members of the Slow Food Lek Magnef Senegal convivium designed the Mangeons Local education program to bring the focus back to local agriculture and food traditions. Together with local cooks from the Slow Food Terra Madre network, and support from Slow Food International, they have delivered the program to two schools in central Dakar with students aged 10 to 12.

Classroom lessons are focused on local breeds and varieties, culinary traditions, and the food communities in the region and are followed by practical cooking sessions and the preparation of traditional recipes. An annual community festival is held at each school to increase awareness among the families and broader public.

The effort to feed the world by an industrial approach to food production and consumption has proven inadequate in terms of health, environmental, economic and cultural consequences. Our disconnection with the pleasure and responsibility of food is having a negative impact on environment, economy, culture and health.

Consumers in Vancouver should care about preserving food traditions in Africa because they are faced with the same dilemmas at home. Because they can learn from one another to improve the situation and because many North American agricultural and trade policies, not to mention cultural influences, have a huge negative impact on less-developed nations' food systems.

There are parents in every country who want their kids to eat good food at school, and gardens on school grounds are growing everywhere. Nearly everyone we speak with agrees that it is increasingly difficult to slow down and share a meal with friends and families, and that we are forgetting our cultural and culinary heritage.

Look to organizations such as Slow Food, DISC and Mangeons Local, which are engaging the next generation of farmers, reigniting our appetite for local food and reminding us to celebrate growing, cooking and eating.

Shayna Bailey is director of international development for Slow Food International. Danielle Nierenberg is a senior researcher with Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., writing from Africa at www.NourishingthePlanet.org.

For permission to republish, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

Guest author Fred Bahnson interviewed Gary Paul Nabhan, a lecturer, food and farming advocate, folklorist, and conservationist who lives and farms in the U.S. Southwest. Nabhan discusses his new book, the future of agriculture, and how 1,400-year-old Lebanese farming techniques influence his land ethic.  

Tell me about your latest book, Where Our Food Comes From-Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. You went on quite an adventure to write this.

The book is about the centers of food diversity - to remind us that although we may want to eat local, we're also indebted to farming cultures in other parts of the world, parts from which our major food crops were historically derived. Maintaining the diversity of these food crops, taking care of the hotspots of food diversity, and ensuring that the indigenous stewards of those areas maintain control of their arable lands is very, very important.    

Nikolay Vavilov is one of my all-time heroes and perhaps the world's greatest plant explorer. He was born in the 1890s, and about a century ago began to visit some 64 countries to document and gather seeds from those places. He built the first international seed bank-international in the sense that people from all countries had access to it and could draw seeds from it. Knowledge about those seeds came from the farmers in the countries of origin.

Ironically, the man who taught us the most about where our food comes from starved to death in the Soviet Gulag. Stalin needed someone to scapegoat for the famine in the early 1930s that killed 3 or 4 million people. The famine resulted from yield declines that happened after the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union.

I've thought a lot about why Vavilov's efforts failed. The political ecology of food production in Russia during that time was such that seed diversity alone could not revitalize agriculture. I think that's true today, that seed diversity alone can't make agriculture sustainable. You need diversity in the sizes of farms, diversity in the kinds of farmers we have, diversity in the scales of agricultural production, rather than just all small farms or all big factory farms.

In a totalitarian state, seed diversity isn't enough to save agriculture. And I don't mean just totalitarian states based in communism, but totalitarianism in places with capitalistic ideologies. Unless there's a good match between food justice, food equity, and food diversity, the food system won't be healthy.

Tell me about your travels to retrace Vavilov's footsteps.

I got to go back to 15 of the 64 countries that Vavilov himself had collected seeds in and see how the food diversity of those countries had changed in the intervening 75 years.

Let me first say that nearly all conservation planning, done by global conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy, is focused on hotspots of biological diversity, some of which we know are in rainforest areas. These are the places most Americans hear about. But what isn't acknowledged is that many of these places, and what I witnessed in the 11 countries I visited on my trip, is that these hotspots of diversity are not necessarily wilderness landscapes. Many of them are cultural landscapes as well. They are places where indigenous people either manage wild vegetation that has wild relatives of crops embedded in it, or the wild species are still managed and protected in cultural landscapes, cultivated landscapes, in the tilled margins, or along fencerows and hedgerows. So there's a compatibility - I wouldn't say harmony because that's a loaded term - between the wild biota and the agricultural diversity.

What struck me as I traveled from Ethiopia to Colombia to Kazakhstan to northern Italy to the Sierra Madre in Mexico is that people are active managers of biological diversity, and their traditions have helped maintain this diversity in place. If we remove the people from these areas and make these places into national parks where agriculture is not allowed or indigenous communities are evicted because they're using resources that conservationists feel should be protected, that we'll lose more than we gain. We are creating what Mark Dowie calls "conservation refugees."

I'm very concerned that Americans understand that the maintenance of diversity on this planet cannot be done by evicting people from those rich habitat areas, but by empowering them to be good stewards of that diversity as they have been in the past.

Talk about how climate change factors into food discussions.

I prefer not to use the term "climate change," but instead to talk about "climate uncertainty." This may not be unidirectional. All places may not warm or get drier. There are quite a few variations in the effects of the global processes that it appears we're going to suffer from. Honoring that there's uncertainty is important.

But if we're trying to protect and revitalize heritage foods, with the place-based heirloom vegetables and heritage breeds of livestock, those heritage breeds will not necessarily be grown in the same places 100 years from now. One scientist, Greg Jones, predicts that 85 percent of the grape varietals in places like Napa Valley will not be able to be grown there under optimum conditions by 2050. Weather shifts will clearly scramble the relationships between place, crop genetics, and cultural traditions over the next 50 years. We need to think about our food traditions and our farming traditions in a much more dynamic way than we previously have.

What do you think will happen by 2050 if we continue on the track we're on in terms of conventional agriculture. Will it even be possible to grow the kind of vast monocultures that we currently grow?

Recently, I've been swayed by the thinking of Alan Nation, who runs a little journal for pasture-based livestock producers called The Stockman Grass Farmer. Alan says that there are economies of scale for large agriculture and large food-distribution systems, and another economy of scale for artisanal production that goes into local food systems. What's really at stake is that "agriculture-of-the-middle." We don't know which way it's going to go. We may still produce some grains on a large scale in 2050 and see them distributed extra-regionally; we still may see that the maple syrup production of Vermont is always sold outside of Vermont.

I don't think the issue has ever been "make agriculture 100-percent local." The issue is about capturing economies of scale, transparency, and traceability by increasing the quality and accessibility of foods that should be produced at a local scale and trying to improve the sustainability of the larger- and middle-scale agriculture as well. In other words, if "sustainability" - whatever that term means - is only something that small farmers care about, and we don't set standards for mid-scale and large-scale agriculture, assuming that it's just going to go away, then we're making a mistake.

I think much of the effort in innovation has been in smaller-scale agriculture to make it sustainable. Some of that may be the incubators for what is carried over to the bigger farms. At another level, some solutions to sustainability are scale-dependent. Rather than antagonizing mid-scale and large-scale agriculturalists, agricultural activists need to figure out a way to help them with problem-solving that needs to be done. I'm not endorsing large-scale feedlots or large-scale apple farms, but I'm also not so naïve to think that great agriculture is all going to be done on 50-acre farms.

But isn't there a point at which farms become too big, when they collapse under their own weight?

Yes, and that's what I mean by "economies of scale." With cereal grains, for instance, if the farm is too small you lose efficiency, both ecological and energetic. But if it's too big you also put it at risk, and part of that risk we've seen is for pests and diseases to evolve quicker than we can put resistance to those things into our crops. We're facing large-scale crop failures from Kenya to Ethiopia and into the Saudi Peninsula for wheat due to a rust epidemic because people planted just a few varieties over an enormously large scale.

My point is the same as yours - agriculture that is too big is already moving toward collapse; but it's also true that there is some optimal scale there for some kind of production, whether it's cereals or beans or something else. We shouldn't become so fundamentalist about local foods that we think they will fulfill all niches of the food system.

What I'd rather see is fair trade between regions for certain things. We think "fair trade" only applies to coffee; but we need to have fair trade apples, too. I'd like to see farmers in the Southeast swap their black-eyed peas and crowder beans with fishermen in the Pacific Northwest for their salmon.

One important point I'd like to make is that it's very important for food activists at every point of their lives to be food producers as well, on whatever scale. I don't think I could be a valid voice on these issues unless I "walked the taco," as we say in the Southwest. I'm spending this next weekend putting in an orchard of 25 fruit-tree varieties, plus crops like asparagus, rhubarb, and prickly pear. In a few more weeks I'll plant annual crops beneath those.

The point is that agricultural science and agricultural activism have become too distant from the needs of farmers and other food producers. The only way to heal the urban/rural divide that we have in this country is for more interplay, more inner-city people to be growing food on rooftops and patios, going out to work on farms during the weekend, and to have farmers in dialogue with consumers so that farmers understand why people want animal-welfare beef, or grassfed lamb, or free-range turkeys. We've broken that dialogue. Very few urban people regularly have access to knowing what farmers and ranchers are struggling with. There's been an unfortunate polarization that's happened as a result of movies like Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc. that make it sounds like consumers are the enemy of farmers and ranchers. We need those two groups in dialogue with each other rather than seeing more drift.

I'm working now with ranchers on something called "The Next Frontier." It's a coalition of farming and ranching groups in the West. We're trying to get farmers incentives for innovative stewardship practices, and for maintaining ecological services such as pollination, watershed health, and soil erosion control. With less than 1.5 percent of Americans self-identifying as farmers or ranchers, the food producers of this country will lose every policy battle in land use planning, in food safety, and other policy domains if they don't embrace dialogue with urban residents who care about the quality and health of their food.

I think more than ever before in American history, we need to heal that urban/rural divide and increase dialogue so that consumers and producers are working together toward the same goals. That means redoing our education system. Nearly every student that comes into state universities - with the exception of colleges like Warren Wilson, Berea, and Green Mountain - is told that if you want to be an educated person, you should not become a farmer. We basically educate people to get off the land instead of teaching them to be good stewards of the land.

Do you think we need more farmers?

I think we need a lot more farmers. We've broken the chain of orally transmitted traditional knowledge that's been passed down for 8,000 years among farmers. You can't learn to farm just from textbooks. Some of the mistakes I've made raising sheep are due to my not having access to my grandfather's knowledge of raising sheep. Had I had him teaching me, I probably wouldn't have made those mistakes.

How did you get interested in food as your life's work? Did that come from your Lebanese heritage?

I grew up in an extended clan of Lebanese immigrants on the Indiana dunes, on the shores of Lake Michigan about 35 miles outside Chicago. My grandfather was a fruit peddler, he had a fruit truck, and he would come home and tell us what the day had been like, whether people had bought more of one variety of plums over the other, whether they were buying bruised fruit or rejecting it, and he also exchanged fruit for fish with a bunch of Swedish fishermen along the shores of Lake Michigan.

He was adamant about the quality of fruit; he would talk about it to me when I was four-years old as if I were his business partner, saying "people just don't understand the quality of fruit anymore." I think there was this quality of food, much of it coming from only 30 miles away. That was a special thing. We seasonally moved from food to food because that was what made the year interesting.

When I went to school for college and lived in a city, I actually lost weight because I couldn't stomach the homogeneous food. Later, when I started working as an intern at the first Earth Day headquarters, then afterward began a career as an environmental scientist and activist, I was struck that food issues were not important to environmentalists. Environmental activists were more concerned about saving national parks and wilderness areas and stopping urban contamination and less about the quality of life on private lands. Fortunately, many of us started reading Aldo Leopold, who said to pay as much attention to conservation and biodiversity on private lands as you do on public lands. That really shaped my thinking.

What are some specific techniques in water harvesting and sustainable farming that you brought back from Lebanon?

I'll talk more broadly about the Middle East as a whole. They do multiple strata gardening and farming where they grow date palms and olive trees as an overstory crop, then grow more heat-sensitive fruits like apricots and peaches sheltered under that, and under that they'll grow onions, shallots, artichokes, rhubarb, and grapes and such. They often have a three- or four-tiered system on the same piece of land. In a high solar environment with a lot of heat it's very important to get the crops in the right temperature range for fruit to ripen, but it also makes very efficient use of water.

The second thing is that they use systems called ganads. These systems funnel either shallow artesian springs or catch water off slickrock and funnel them into community irrigation systems that are communally managed. Unlike the American West, it's not every man for himself trying to obtain the maximum amount of water, but is rather a community rationing of available rainfall and artesian springwaters. Some of these systems have lasted for 1,000 or even 1,400 years without salination or depletion or contamination.

Nearby, within 20 miles, you can see failed irrigation projects where international development groups have perforated the groundwater, salinized the soil, and ushered in saltwater incursion from the coast. These were multi-million dollar investments that went belly up within 20 years. Juxtapose those with the ganad systems that have been stable for 1,400 years.

On our land in southern Arizona, we're putting in an orchard of ancient desert fruits. My goal is to first increase the water-holding capacity and nutrient abundance of the soil by using terra preta, or biochar. I'm also adding pottery shards and mulch from nitrogen-fixing legume trees that naturally occur on the land, and then, like Joel Salatin says, "stacking" food resources in the same ecosystem so I'm doing a multi-strata orchard of desert-adapted foods that partition the sunlight and water rather than one crop like sugar cane sucking all the water and nutrients out of the soil. Some of the plants I've planted are there to regenerate and give back nutrients to make up for the nutrients I'm taking.

At a certain point I regret that, around 1982, we didn't go with the term regenerative agriculture but instead chose sustainable agriculture. The "S" word has become so hollow and distorted that it's allowed people to greenwash their business with it. Bob Rodale at the Rodale Institute, one of the godfathers of the organic movement, encouraged Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry and I to use the term regenerative agriculture, and I think he was right. That would have been a much better term by which to measure the success of our own stewardship practices.

Fred Bahnson is a Kellogg Food & Society fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and a contributing author for the Worldwatch Institute.Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about improving livelihoods through sustainable agriculture.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org. 

 
Just when leaders in the U.S. Senate admitted to abandoning their plan of issuing a federal climate bill by the end of this year, top Chinese officials were discussing how to launch carbon trading programs under their country's next Five-Year Plan (2011-15).

Serving as China's overarching social and economic guidance, Five-Year Plans consistently lay out the most crucial development strategies for this giant emerging economy. Once included in the plan, carbon trading will be viewed as part of China's national goals and will be domestically binding. This occurred most recently with the country's 2010 energy intensity target, which called for a 20-percent reduction from 2005 levels and was disaggregated into provincial and local targets, with local officials held accountable for achieving them.

In short, China seems to be accelerating full-throttle toward a low-carbon economy.

Chinese policymakers have been eyeing a domestic emission-trading scheme for a while. Last August, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Deputy Director Xie Zhenhua announced that China would launch a pilot carbon trading program in selected regions and/or sectors-basically the same message now discussed for the Five-Year Plan. On one hand, this reiteration demonstrates that the Chinese government is seriously considering such a market-based mitigation mechanism; on the other hand, the fact that the program's status is still in discussion one year later shows that putting cap-and-trade into action might be not be so easy in China either.

Here are some of the problems: A non-voluntary emission-trading system cannot work without a mandatory cap on emissions, either for the economy as a whole or for individual sectors. However, China is currently unlikely to set an absolute emission target because this would contradict its long-standing position at international climate negotiations that industrialized countries have a historic responsibility to take the lead in this area. Most Chinese climate officials and experts agree that China could probably peak its emissions between 2030 and 2035, but huge uncertainties remain.

Moreover, with the current U.S. emissions reduction commitment unsatisfactory to most developing countries, China won't change its position unless the United States changes its own position first. Unless significant efforts are made on the U.S. end (through a commitment to a more stringent emission reduction target), China will stick to the emission intensity target announced in November 2009 as its international commitment.

In addition, a well-functioning emission-trading system would require sophisticated monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) mechanisms. The Chinese government has been making progress in building MRV capacities, but it still lacks transparency in terms of what has been done and how.

Take for example the government's regularly reported energy intensity data. Not only have annual reduction figures been subject to change in sequential publications - the 2006 number has already been "corrected" three times - but the reporting procedure has made it difficult to track and verify the underlying calculations. The National Statistic Bureau's annual report on energy intensity reduction, for instance, reveals only the intensity figure, without showing the deflator used to produce the 2005 base-level GDP, making it impossible to check the pace of the reduction using publicized energy consumption and GDP data. In short, published statistical reports show government numbers but do not reveal how they were calculated.

Finally, a feasible cap-and-trade design would have to consider many details, such as which sectors are covered by the cap, how emission allowances will be distributed, whether there will be price corridors, etc. These design features touch on powerful economic interests. In China, this means that the actual design of the scheme will not be publicized unless the interests of all parties are subtly balanced.

Pilot trading programs in selected regions and/or sectors may help to mature the mechanism while minimizing the scale of negative impacts, such as job losses in inefficient factories. Already, several local governments have taken initiatives to establish voluntary trading schemes.

Thus far, most existing Chinese stock exchanges have focused on broad environmental equities such as environmental technologies and emissions of conventional pollutants: companies with new pollution-control technologies can sell them on the exchange, with sulfur dioxide emission allowances being the major tradable pollution equity. Now, many markets are preparing for the introduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions trading. For instance, the Tianjin Climate Exchange is expected to launch a carbon trading scheme by the end of 2010, and Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, has submitted to the NDRC an application to be the first "National Pilot Center for Carbon Trading." Although detailed information is lacking for these initiatives, they demonstrate the government's serious efforts, at the national as well as provincial and local levels, to try to bring the trading mechanism into reality.

Even if these efforts are successful, the international community needs to keep in mind that China would adopt such a carbon trading scheme strictly in its own interest-that is, to reduce local air pollution, increase energy security, and gain a competitive advantage in the energy markets of the future. In the United States, new energy entrepreneurs have mentioned the same self-interest motivation, as demonstrated recently at the Clean Energy Ministerial Stakeholder meeting (click here to view major U.S. stakeholders' presentations). However, with a stronger market signal now unlikely for many years because of the delay in comprehensive national climate and energy legislation, the United States might well fall behind China in this new era of global competition over green technologies and services.

It is rather unlikely that China's pilot carbon trading schemes will lead to an economy-wide emission cap in the near future (they might lead to sectoral national schemes first and an economy-wide cap later). Meanwhile, several other market-based mitigation options are under serious consideration in China. In a 2009 report, the Ministry of Finance's Research Center for Fiscal Science (RCFS) proposed introducing a carbon tax in the next five years. While China likely won't commit to a single mandatory national mitigation mechanism anytime soon, it will be interesting to see how the economic and political interests play out during the coming months and years.

Alexander Ochs is director of the Climate and Energy program at the Worldwatch Institute and Haibing Ma is the China Program Manager with Worldwatch. They can be reached at aochs@worldwatch.org.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Re-Volt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

 
Incensed by the injustices suffered by his family and other farmworkers, Baldemar Velasquez founded the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in 1967. FLOC works to give migrant farmworkers across the United States a voice by including them in decision-making processes on conditions that affect their lives.

What is your background, and how did you come to found FLOC?

My family was recruited into the migrant-worker stream back in the early 1950s from South Texas to harvest tomatoes, sugar beets, and other hand-harvest crops in Ohio, Michigan, and the Midwest. That began my long odyssey in this work, getting stranded in Ohio and not making enough money to get back to Texas. In those early years we didn't even have our own transportation and we got so in debt one fall [that] we had to stay the winter and borrow more money from the local farmers just to stay alive. Then we worked off the winter debt the next summer, working for free in the fields. We then stayed another winter and were in debt again. We sort of became like indentured workers for about seven years.

Just to get out of debt, we traveled the summers around the Midwest to find the back-to-back crops. In Michigan, [we worked] with the cherries and the strawberries, and trimming Christmas trees, then back to Ohio for the sugar beets and the tomato and cucumber harvest, right into the fall and picking potatoes for the local farmers.

The silver lining in all of this was that I was able to learn English and stay in school - it was cold at home and warm in the schoolhouse, so I kept going back to school. I ended up going to college almost by accident! I didn't think that college was for Mexican kids. I thought it was for white kids, and my senior literature teacher said, "Why not?" - my grades were good enough. During college vacations, I would go back to the fields to work, and by my senior year I was already organizing my dad and his friends and my mom and her comadres in the fields.

Can you describe some of the biggest challenges and most common abuses faced by farmworkers in the United States?

Well, there's the outward abuses, like stealing your wages, getting cheated in your pay, employers cooking the books and falsely reporting the wages of workers. And a lot of times they hide it. Our whole family worked together, but only my dad and my mom would get a paycheck. So they reported it as individual earnings, but it was really the collective earnings of all of us who worked on piece-rate crops. We were regularly cheated out of minimum wages. And as long as people were working piece-rates - getting paid by the bucket, by the acre, by the lug, by the crate, by whatever container or unit we were working and getting paid for - the record keeping of hours was very sporadic and very distorted.

Then there's the disregard for the health of the workers. Many times the [state] legislation was so lax you could house people in chicken coops and barns and still qualify to have registered labor camps. And even then, whatever laws were in the books were never enforced anyway.

And then the human abuse: the tongue lashings that workers would get, that women would get from unscrupulous labor contractors, crew leaders, field men, and even some farmers. One of the things that would really shock me and anger me was the way they would talk to my mom, in earshot of my little sisters who were all smaller. Well, it makes a young man very angry, and you want to do something, but you don't know what to do.

How common is child labor in agricultural production today, and do you think labor policies can address the problem?

We've had child labor laws on the books for a long time. And the problem with any kind of laws governing the agriculture sector is the lax enforcement, or no enforcement at all. I started working the fields when I was six. By the time I was eight or nine, I was already carrying an adult load in terms of ability to harvest the number of lugs or crates or baskets or hampers or whatever.

As far as putting more inspectors in the fields to enforce child labor laws, it's a two-edged sword. The reason parents have their kids in the field is not because they like child labor, but - in our family - the alternative was not eating. And that's what it boils down to. And it's very easy to say, "Yeah, let's pass some laws and get really tough enforcement and big fines for those who have kids in the fields." But if you get the kids out of the fields, okay, so then what - you let them languish in the labor camps all by themselves? They have nothing to do. Or you take away an adult wage-earner to stay home and babysit them? Take away that income from the family?

You cannot talk about eliminating child labor without dealing with the other family impact - for instance, family income. The kids may not create as much income as an adult worker, but it is income. And we used to pool our income as a whole family to make ends meet, to stay alive. You've got to make jobs where adults can earn a living, so the kids don't have to be in the fields and you can still provide for them, you can still give them food. You can't just say, let's eliminate child labor. All these advocates in Washington talking about child labor laws and so on, well-intentioned as it is, they're not addressing the other issues.

What are some of the health hazards that farmworkers face?

Every crop has different foliage and its own chemical make-up, and sometimes people have allergies and react to them, not to mention the residue that might be on some of those crops - the fungicides, the pesticides that they spray on them, and the lack of enforcement on reentry time in the field. You can have all the regulations you want - if you don't have a way in which workers can police that and be able to decisively do something without fear of retaliation, then the laws aren't going to do you a lot of good.

I've watched over the years well-intentioned efforts like the Environmental Protection Agency's Worker Protection Standards, and the required training of workers around pesticides and so on. And they have put millions into funding organizations to train workers about pesticide safety. Well, here's my question: a worker gets out of bed in the morning, and he sees a farmer who just finished spraying a field, and the crew leader takes him out there and says, "Okay, time to go to work." He's educated about the reentry time and knows it is too early to go back in. (The more toxic ones have longer reentry periods - two-, three-day reentry period).

But the difference between a trained worker and an untrained worker is either that you're knowingly going to go in and get poisoned or you're not knowingly going to get poisoned. The guy that knowingly goes in and gets poisoned, what's his choice? What are his options? Not go and maybe get fired? And get retaliated against? What do you have on the books to protect him from being retaliated against, and how is he going to process that - file a complaint with the Department of Labor, who might respond in two weeks? And then you have to pack up and go make a living with your family somewhere else. Where is the follow-up on that particular incident? What good does it do you that day? That's the problem.

So there's the problem in terms of the chemicals, the residues on the plants. There's also the climate issue. We have had nine deaths in the fields of North Carolina in recent years, seven of them from heat stroke. This summer already, among our membership, we've had two heatstroke cases: One guy is still in a coma, and the other fellow just came out of a coma. We have him in a hospitality place down where we're working on his workers' compensation case. In the past, those workers who didn't have an organization, well, they were out of luck. They were forgotten, put on the bus and sent back to Mexico, or just left to languish wherever they are.

So a lot of that is just due to pure neglect. The farmers can be held accountable, but workers have to have a right to make decisions about when they can walk out of a field, when they can file a complaint or a grievance with the employer. Already this summer we've probably processed a couple of hundred complaints from workers.

What success have you had working with food companies?

FLOC pioneered the supply chain agreements back in the 80s. The first big fight was the Campbell Soup Company. And of course, their first argument publicly was, "Oh, we're not the employer. We just buy it from suppliers. We can't get involved. It's like telling our book binders from our printing company what to do with their employees." We heard it all. But the bottom line is the supply chain is the procurement system to get the raw products that they need to process in their food products. And that procurement system is created by human design. It did not happen accidentally. They are the ones who designed it; they are the ones who can redesign in.

That was our argument, and it played out in public opinion. We had enough people boycotting that company. We did a boycott that lasted seven years, until we concluded the first multi-party supply-chain collective bargaining agreement in labor history. The company, their growers, suppliers, and the farmworkers sat around one table and negotiated one agreement that all three parties could live with.

So we've done that with Campbell's - we've totally radicalized the way the price of tomatoes was structured to benefit the small farmer. And the differences between the wage increases and the medical benefits that we won were subsidized and paid for by the company. So the farmers had happier workers who were better taken care of, and were therefore more productive. 

In the cucumber campaign, when we took on the Vlasic Pickle Company, Heinz USA, Green Bay Foods (now Dean Foods), and Aunt Jane's Pickle company, we completely radicalized the structure of how cucumbers were being harvested to do the pickles. We eliminated the old sharecropping system that the industry used to circumvent the Fair Labor Standards Act. The workers were actually categorized as sharecroppers because the piece-rate earning was 50 percent of the value of what they harvested. But they did a lot of work for free as a result of that, like the preparation of the vine, the vine training, the hoeing. All that was not paid for because the workers were technically independent contractors, self-employed. But we changed them to an "employee" category, which made them subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act, the minimum wage laws, and the child labor laws.

When we changed the workers' status from independent contractors to employees, that eliminated all the free labor.... And it made it too expensive for the farmers to have children in the fields, because then you had to pay them minimum wage as employees! But in order to facilitate what to do with the kids, we got a public-private partnership with the companies and growers, and the workers, and we negotiated with the National Migrant Headstart program to increase the number of facilities in Ohio to take in the extra kids that they didn't have space for in the Headstart programs in Ohio. And the compensatory education programs that would take kids over six years old.

Now there was a one-year turnaround time to get the money pipeline flowing to Ohio from the federal government, so in that first transition year, we got Heinz, Campbell Soup, and the Dean Foods company to fund a contract with the Headstart Program and the elementary school in Sandusky County in Ohio to open up for the summer, to take those kids in on a one-year basis. And we got the expanded services the following year under the regular Headstart program. So we took care of the kids, we took care of the increased income, because the workers were being treated as employees. Workers were then subject to workers' comp., unemployment compensation, and social security.

Of course, the companies did this under duress because of threats of boycotts from us. But we made them do a study over the first three years of the agreement - and the Heinz company did a very careful study for those three years, and they came out and released a report in 1990 indicating that productivity had risen 46 percent. So their increase in price was well worth it.

How do global agricultural and trade policies affect your work in the U.S.?

It is catastrophic. The globalization issue is forcing us to do more of this supply-chain thinking. For instance, these companies get their cucumbers during the deep winter months (when they're not available anywhere in the United States) from as far away as India and Sri Lanka. How do we interfere with the conditions of their purchase agreements of these cucumbers, and work through these brokers? I think the answer to that, taking a lesson from the Students Against Sweatshops, is not only to create Codes of Conduct, but we have to have a partnership with our counterparts in those countries.

We have experimented with tomatoes, cucumbers, and now tobacco in Mexico - that's the nearest source for American companies, of those products that we compete with. For instance, in 1989 we negotiated a deal with the Mexican unions that produce, cut, and process the tomatoes that were processed into paste in Mexico, to be used by the Campbell Soup company in Ohio. We did a campaign with those counterpart unions in Mexico to increase the workers' wages and benefits by 18 percent in order to make it a little bit more equitable in terms of the competition. In other words, the competition has to be like a pendulum upward, not a pendulum downward where they're using us against each other to see who can work for the cheapest.

We have to have these international agreements signed and hopefully give leverage to our counterpart workers to be able to have freedom of assembly and rights to organize, in order to not create the wage gaps that are so glaring at this point.

What kinds of changes would you like to see in agriculture, labor, or immigration policies to improve working conditions?

When you talk about policies, I assume you're talking about governmental policies, but I think there has to be a change of thinking. I think for too long our public policy has really been one of subsidizing the agricultural industry, and marginalizing and institutionalizing the poverty of agricultural workers. For instance, many of our progressive liberal friends who push for different government programs, subsidies, even the Headstart program for instance, food stamps, the federally funded migrant clinics, and so on - all of these things are really not subsidies to the farmworkers. They're really subsidies to the agricultural industry.

Why do farmworkers qualify for food stamps? Look, you're dealing with a group of workers who are not unemployed, they're not disabled, they're some of the hardest working people in America. People should beg the question, "Why is it then that from that difficult and hard work that they do, they can't feed, educate, and clothe their own family? Why do they have to rely on government handouts and food stamps and migrant clinics and so on? Why can't they, off the sweat off their back, be able to provide food, shelter, and healthcare for their own families?"

The reason is because we have an agricultural system that is dysfunctional, that is lopsided. And we favor a public policy that institutionalizes what is, instead of shifting the paradigms of the way the industry itself is structured. I'm not just talking domestically, this is global. That's why I feel we've got to do something about it. It starts with having an initiative by workers themselves, and then we can have an impact in the structures of agriculture and radically change it.

What role can American food consumers play in supporting agricultural workers' rights?

Historically, what the farmworker movement has done - going back to Cesar Chavez's boycott of grapes and other vegetables and fruits - we highlight the mistreatment of workers, and consumers can play a hand in correcting it by boycotting the related products that we're referring to.

But now there's a growing consciousness around the country, and that's backed up by experts in sales and marketing who study the bar-coding of purchases. More than a third of all consumers are conscientious buyers, and they are looking for healthy lifestyles, healthy environment, and good treatment of other human beings. And it's true of the animal industry as well - the Humane Society and others are very prominent. Consumers want to buy things that are not made by exploiting people, animals, or resources, so we're trying to capitalize on that to create a win-win-win situation, to give employers and food companies an incentive to do things in a better way.

We definitely need something along the lines of coffee's Fair Trade approach, to make agricultural products produced in a similar vein. I think that will resonate with consumers and that's the direction we would want to go.

Ronit Ridberg is a research intern with the Worldwatch Institute. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about improving livelihoods through sustainable agriculture.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org. 

The following op-ed originally appeared in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

For most of us, finding a bathroom or toilet isn't hard. Chances are it's not more than a short walk away - you may even be there now. For 2.5 billion people around the world, however, it isn't that easy. Their bathroom is likely shared, has no running water and is a walk from their house. And you thought port-a-potties were bad.

The lack of access to sanitation is a huge challenge to the 1 billion people living in urban slums in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The dangers of inadequate sanitation infrastructure are well known - contaminated drinking water and disease transmission become difficult to avoid. Even more unfortunate is the fact that these dangers are often lethal to children, the elderly and the sick, the most vulnerable members of communities. And in cities, the lack of bathrooms and latrines can also be dangerous, particularly for women, who are often harassed and assaulted when seeking out a latrine or place to bathe.

Or consider the amount of time that urban residents spend waiting in line for public restrooms. The World Health Organization estimates that the average is 30 minutes per person per day. That's almost 20 days per year, time that could be better spent in economic activities, education or child rearing.

In Pune, a city of almost 5 million in western India, 40 percent live in slums. Ratnakar Gaikwad, the municipal commissioner of Pune, describes the situation: "When I took over as municipal commissioner of Pune, the ratio of toilets to people in the slums was one toilet seat for every 800 persons. We did the math to understand the magnitude of the problem. Technically, if everybody queued up to use one of these toilets, the last man's turn would arrive after 15 days." 

And although the benefits of improved sanitation deliver huge boosts to public health, gender equality, economic growth and poverty reduction, they often remain low priorities for budget allocations and official development assistance.

While large intergovernmental organizations such as UN Habitat are working to help slum dwellers gain access to sanitation, there is also a role for smaller organizations, including those in the private sector, to address these issues.

A Swedish architect has come up with one solution. Anders Wilhelmson has designed the playfully named Peepoo bag, helping provide a neat, well-thought out answer to a tough question: How do you provide sanitation to the world's poor? The bag can be used without water (although water is necessary for post-Peepoo handwashing), and is lined with urea, which helps destroy pathogens found in feces and urine while turning the waste into fertilizer, or "humanure." In fact, Wilhelmson predicts the rise of an informal economy springing up around the trade of Peepoo bags and the valuable humanure they can contain.

For a city like Nairobi, Kenya, which produces 60 percent of its food within the urban boundary, the possibility of a local, inexpensive source of fertilizer is an exciting prospect.

Small, locally based NGOs are also presenting solutions to the task of improving sanitation in the poorest parts of the world. In Haiti, after the destruction of the already inadequate sanitation infrastructure in January, smart solutions were needed quickly. 

Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods, or SOIL, a nonprofit dedicated to improving soil resources and transforming waste into a resource, partnered with Oxfam to build dry toilets. These toilets are used in tandem with a public waste composting site to convert the dry waste into fertilizer.

This company and NGO are trying to come up with solutions that are designed with the developing world in mind and they seek to turn the recipients of aid into customers and participants who decide what is valuable to them. They are low-cost, low-maintenance, multiple-use products that have the potential to introduce sustainable sanitation to parts of the world that need it most.

Danielle Nierenberg, co-project director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project. Daniel Kandy is a research intern at the Worldwatch Institute.

For permission to republisht this report, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

Clean Energy is not some distant dream awaiting federal decisions; in the state of Massachusetts, we have gotten busy.

Massachusetts has a long been a hot bed of innovation. Under Governor Deval Patrick, our innovative zeal has turned full force to our energy challenges, and the early results are impressive. 

First and foremost, our focus is on finding every cost-effective intervention to reduce energy waste. These energy efficiency efforts were unleashed through the Commonwealth's passage of the Green Communities Act in 2008 - comprehensive clean energy legislation that, among other things, mandates that electric and gas utilities procure all cost-effective energy efficiency on behalf of their ratepayers. With more than 20 years of substantial and continuous experience investing in cost effective energy efficiency, we have capable and committed partners in our utilities, contractors, vendors, and other stakeholders to help us figure out exactly how best to find and deliver all energy efficiency that makes economic sense. 

Last year, the Department of Public Utilities approved three-year energy efficiency plans developed in partnership with my office and a host of other stakeholders. Among the ambitious goals embodied in the plans is a projected 2.4 percent annual savings in electric consumption.  While Massachusetts is already extraordinarily frugal in terms of energy consumption, delivering about $200 of gross state product out of every million Btus of energy consumed (approximately twice the national average), our success in reducing energy waste even more will help us grow our economy while demonstrating energy and environmental leadership.

Our second focus is to develop more renewable energy sources through a variety of methods. Activities to date have included establishing a rebate program for solar photovoltaic (PV) and now transitioning to an RPS [renewable portfolio standard] market structure for PV, establishing utility-owned PV as an additional development model, and requiring utilities to enter into long-term renewable output contracts for the express purpose of facilitating the financing of renewable power projects. These policies have put us on track to increase solar power 20-fold over a four-year period - from 3.5 megawatts to 70 megawatts - and wind power 10-fold. At the same time, they have resulted in a more than doubling of solar employment and a fourfold increase in companies installing solar energy here.

We are also focused on mobilizing all constituents in these energy opportunities. For instance, our Green Communities Division has deployed regional support staff to provide counsel and expertise to cities and towns considering renewables development, energy procurement and consumption monitoring, and energy efficiency. In the first round of designation, 35 municipalities rose to the challenge of becoming official Green Communities by meeting high standards of energy management and commitment to renewable energy, including adopting a local-option high-efficiency "stretch" energy code for new construction. This made them eligible for a share of $8.1 million in grants to help these communities do even more to go green in their energy use.

In Massachusetts, we're not waiting for anybody - we're creating our clean energy future today.

Phil Giudice is commissioner of Massachusetts's Department of Energy Resources.

Visit Worldwatch's ReVolt blog to learn more about state-led initiatives to expand clean energy deployment across the United States.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog ReVolt. For permission to republish this article, please contact Alex Kostura at akostura@worldwatch.org.

Washington, D.C.-The Worldwatch Institute announced today that Haibing Ma, a respected expert on Chinese climate and energy policy, has joined the Institute as China Program Manager. Prior to coming to Worldwatch, Ma was an International Policy Associate at the Center for Clean Air Policy, where he led the Center's China activities.

"We are pleased to welcome Haibing Ma to our team," said Christopher Flavin, President of Worldwatch. "The Institute has long emphasized the global importance of China's energy and environmental agenda. Our China program seeks to facilitate better communication on sustainability between China and the rest of the world. Haibing's extensive expertise in this area makes him the ideal candidate to help us achieve this goal."

As one of his first assignments, Ma will implement a China Green Economy Project sponsored by the Finnish government. The project will explore the opportunities and challenges that a green economy offers for China, and will help policymakers in the rapidly developing country understand the enormous economic, environmental, and security implications of the decisions they face.

Ma will work closely with Worldwatch's Chinese partners to expand the Institute's work in the country. "Having Haibing on the ground in China, working with decision makers on all political levels from the local to the international, will greatly improve both our understanding of, and our impact on, the country," said Alexander Ochs, Director of Worldwatch's Climate and Energy Program, who has known and worked with Ma for many years.

Haibing Ma is pleased to be joining the Worldwatch team: "Worldwatch has been a respected voice in academic and policy circles in China for decades. I look forward to helping shape the global conversation about Chinese environment, climate, and energy policy in my new position."

Ma holds a B.A. in Public Administration from Zhejiang University in China and a M.S. in Public Policy Analysis from Peking University. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Environmental Policy from the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The Worldwatch Institute is an international research organization based in Washington, D.C. that has provided fact-based analysis of global economic, resource, and environmental trends to decision makers around the world since 1974. The Institute's work has been published in 36 languages and regularly reaches top policymakers.

Erik Nicholson, National Vice President of United Farm Workers of America (UFWA), has worked extensively on helping farm workers and their families avoid the damages of pesticide exposure. He has served as one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's two national farm-worker representatives on its national pesticide advisory committee, the Pesticide Program Dialog Committee, and helped organize the first national guest-worker union contract. The UFWA, founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez, is the nation's first successful and largest farm workers union.

Can you please contextualize the work you do, in what has become a global system of agriculture?

We are now importing the majority of the food we eat. The overwhelming majority of workers who harvest the food we eat in the United States are not from this country. And many if not most of the workers employed in the fields in the United States are displaced farmers from their own countries (mostly Mexico but not exclusively). So we're seeing that many of the same pressures and challenges that are facing farmers in the U.S. are the very same ones that are displacing small farmers in the global South and resulting in them coming in search of employment to the United States, Canada, Australia, and European Union. At the same time, farmers and sometimes their spouses in the U.S. are looking for second jobs in more urban settings.

When Vietnam entered the global market with coffee, we saw an unprecedented exodus of coffee farmers out of eastern Mexico. When NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] was signed, mass exodus of corn farmers [took place] - so we see a direct correlation between these international trade policies and agricultural practices and kind of the global crisis of agriculture that we're facing.

Within that context, you look at agriculture in the United States and pretty much anyone born in this country has no aspirations to work in the fields. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, the reason is because we all know the conditions are not good, the pay is pretty bad, and there's really no benefits. As a result, we have depended on immigrant workers to come up and do the work that we haven't wanted to do. And so if you look at the history of the United Farm Workers, we've had workers literally from around the world as members - from Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Yemen, African-Americans, and, of course, Mexicans, Central Americans - and the internationalization of the workforce continues. We now have workers working under contract from Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, and it's very much become a global workforce that is harvesting the food we eat.

UFW recently hosted an international gathering of farm workers from 14 different countries. Can you share some of your impressions of that gathering?

It was just amazing to have people who are doing the same work we've been doing for 50 years in the United States, together in the same room. We were in awe of just how bad it is out there. We think it's bad here, and then you talk to folks from Ecuador or Peru, who come to the States telling us, "What are you guys complaining about? You don't know the half of it." And so as we really compared notes, the contexts were different, but it was appalling just how bad it is for farm workers across the world. That was sobering.

But at the same time, it was tremendously exciting to meet people who give a damn, and who are actually out there in the trenches trying to make a difference. It was a very lively conversation. We did a lot of work just getting to know each other and the different contexts in which we're working and actively looking for ways to collaborate. One of the first things that came to mind for all of us was that we need to educate the world about how bad it is for farm workers, and why everyone who eats should care! We've established relationships that have never existed before, and we are actively working to build upon those to see what we can do for workers globally.

What do the popular "food movements" of today have to do with farm workers' rights, and how can individual consumers get more involved in supporting change around the world?

Just look at the whole conversation about "sustainability," the buy-local fad, and that was preceded by the organic fad, and the whole mythology that was erected around those concepts that included somehow that workers were going to be treated better. When the reality is there are local farmers I would never ever in a million years buy something from, but I would gladly pay a premium to have it flown in 2,000 miles because I know workers there are treated well. And while workers aren't exposed to as many toxins in organics, there are still toxins in the organic world that are allowed, and organics does nothing on the labor front. So I think we need to make sure that labor is part of the equation.

I've found that people are frequently reluctant to dirty their hands because you're dealing with three very politically charged issues: the sustainability of small farmers, immigration policy, and labor. If you really want to stand with the people who are out there right now in the field, rather than projecting a better future theoretically, find out who's picking your food and how you can stand with them. Boycott Arizona and let your voice be heard that those types of laws are unacceptable. Support immigration reform, so we can provide legal status to the hundreds of thousands of people that put food on our table. And then really be an advocate to help support the people that are here, now, in their struggle to make a better life for themselves.

It is incumbent on us as people who care about food and care about the viability of small farmers to understand that these realities are the same for hundreds if not millions of people worldwide.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing farm workers?

Two of the biggest issues are a lack of legal status and lack of economic viability. And so you have hundreds of thousands of people that we depend on, that have no vehicle currently to obtain legal status. And they're literally dying to be able to be here legally, but we've offered them no way to do it.

We find labor is still one of the few costs that growers consider to be a flexible cost, rather than a fixed cost. There's not a lot of space in terms of negotiating what you're going to pay for diesel fuel, or what the newest and greatest pesticides are going to cost, but there's a constant search for the cheapest labor. And as a result we continue to see, from our perspective, widespread violations of workers' rights in the fields. So things like 15 workers literally dropping dead in the fields in California, just under the administration of our current governor, due to farmers' failure to provide a shaded rest area and adequate drinking water. On top of that, and depending on whose statistics you're looking at, you add that agriculture has  a 4-7 times higher injury and fatality rate than non-agricultural industries, and you get a sense of just how bad it is out there.

We're not unsympathetic to the economic pressures that U.S. producers are facing. But unfortunately the way that the response has been is for farm workers literally to subsidize the cost of our cheap food with their lives, with their family's wellbeing, and make this industry a profoundly unsustainable one. Documented or undocumented, the average wage in agriculture is somewhere between $15,000-18,000 a year. That's just not economically sustainable. So we've got to figure out a way that the folks that pick our food can have a true livelihood.

The other issue, which I guess we shouldn't beat around the bush, is race. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of people that work in the fields are people of color. I would point out that if we had a majority of Anglos out there, there would be an absolute outrage if 15 people dropped dead in the fields in California due to heat stress. But there's barely a sound made. So I think we've got some serious obstacles in terms of making sure that literally everybody is at the table in this conversation. We need to raise those sensibilities and the awareness that workers have an important voice-that is the foundation on which any kind of true sustainability in our food production has to be based.

What kinds of changes would you like to see in agricultural, labor, or immigration policies?

First of all, we need to break down the national barriers, and recognize that it is a global system, regardless of what we think about it. That is just a reality-people are in boats right now, crossing to the Canary Islands; they're in boats right now, crossing to the Dominican Republic and Haiti to Puerto Rico; and crossing the desert as we speak. And so the first thing we need to figure out is how to support those people who, due to primarily economic desperation, are searching for better lives for their families, and minimize the deaths, the debt peonage, the trafficking that's occurring.

We have got to start talking to each other across boundaries. Respect the national differences and the work, and how we do it, but understand that for us and Mexico, we're tied at the hip. And so it's incumbent upon us to care about a small Mexican producer who's scrounging up $5,000 to pay a recruiter so he can get a H2A guest worker visa, and then he shows up here and is subjected to slave-like conditions. That reality is bi-national, and our work needs to reflect that. So I think that's the first challenge.

The second challenge is to recognize that we have global opportunities as a result of this global system. We could work collaboratively to hold multinational companies accountable and raise the standards for workers and producers in all those countries. Same goes for supermarket chains: there are very few supermarket chains that are only active now in one country. Increasingly, they're active in a multitude of countries. That's an opportunity for us to approach those chains and say, "Hey, it's not okay for you to be sourcing products from workers who are mistreated or held in debt peonage or worse." And to collaborate across borders to hold those supermarket chains accountable.

And then I think the third component is we've got to figure out a way to support these producers so their livelihoods can be sustainable. And that the workers they employ, regardless of the country, also have a sustainable future-because at the end of the day, we need people to work the fields. And our perspective is it's a very dignified job and one of the most important jobs out there because absent those folks, we don't eat. But we've got to get to a point where, at a minimum, those working in the fields need to earn a fair wage, get fair benefits, and have improved working conditions. That's a responsibility that we all bear throughout the supply chain from consumers to retailers to farmers, all the way through. If we were to boil it down to economics and immigration, and be able to make changes there, that would revolutionize the industry.

Ronit Ridberg is a research intern with the Worldwatch Institute. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about the role of consumers in improving farm workers' rights and livelihoods.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

Millions of cassava farmers in eastern and central Africa are in distress from viral cassava diseases that are sweeping across the region and ravaging their crops. But their counterparts on the popular tourist island of Zanzibar are undergoing a quiet revolution using new disease-resistant and high-yielding varieties that were introduced three years ago.

The four varieties, Kizimbani, Mahonda, Kama, and Machui, have given cassava a new lease on life after the crop was devastated by the two main diseases afflicting the region: brown streak disease and mosaic disease. The diseases, which are spread by white flies, cost Africa's cassava sector more than US$1 billion in damages every year. Small-scale farmers - among the poorest in the region - bear most of the economic effects.

Cassava mosaic disease first appeared in Uganda in the mid-1980s and spread rapidly in cassava-growing areas of eastern and central Africa through the sharing of infected planting materials and via the white fly vector. Following the development and deployment of resistant and tolerant varieties and widespread awareness-raising on ways to curb the mosaic's spread, scientists, governments, non-governmental organizations, and farmers were able to bring the disease nearly under control. Then the cassava brown streak struck. This disease had been around for much longer but was confined to the coastal low-altitude areas of Eastern Africa and around Lake Malawi. From 2004, it started spreading rapidly to mid-altitude areas that were recovering from the mosaic, sending scientists back to the drawing board.

Haji Saleh, the head of Zanzibar's roots and tuber program under the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment, says the first survey of cassava brown streak on the island was conducted in 1994 and indicated that 20 percent of the crop had disease symptoms. In a follow-up survey in 2002, the disease was found everywhere. "All the local varieties grown by the farmers were susceptible. The farmer and authorities were crying out for help," Saleh said.

Heeding the call for help, Zanzibar crop scientists in collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) started a breeding program to develop cassava varieties that were resistant to the two diseases. Their efforts paid off, and after only four years, four new varieties were released in 2007.

"You have to understand, cassava is a very important staple in Zanzibar, where it comes in second after rice," Saleh said. "However, it is first in terms of acreage and production with over 90 percent of farmers growing the crop. It is our food security crop as it grows in most of the agro-ecological zones including in the dry parts of the island where other crops do not perform well. So when the diseases hit, they were very devastating to the island's food security. We had to act fast."

The research team then started a rapid multiplication program, working with the farmers to spread the improved varieties on the island and beyond. "We selected pilot farmers in each district to help with the multiplication," Saleh said. "We trained them on how to grow cassava to get good yields and maintain soil fertility, and on business skills, as they were to sell the planting material as a business."

One farmer, 59-year-old Ramadhani Abdala Ame of Kianga village - a father of 10 - participated in the on-farm trials using the improved varieties. During the trials, the farmers helped the researchers select not only the best performing varieties, but also those that met farmer preferences and requirements for various uses of the crops. Ramadhani said he had given up on cassava, which was suffering from "kensa ya mhogo," or "cancer of the cassava." Infected by the brown streak disease, the crop develops a dry rot in its roots - the most economically important part of the plant - which makes it useless for consumption.

"The cassava looked good in the field, but when you harvested, the roots were rotten and useless, with all your labor and efforts going down the drain," Ramadhani said. He explained that he was given 40 cuttings of the four new varieties to test on his farm. "At that time, they did not have names, only numbers. I was amazed at their performance: the  tubers were huge, and had no disease. I selected the two I liked best that were later renamed Kizimbani and Machui."

Ramadhani said the sale of cassava roots and planting materials has made a big difference in his life. He has bought two cows to add to his stock, constructed a cowshed, and is now building a better brick and iron-sheet house for his family.

Another pilot farmer, Suleiman John Ndebe of Machui village, had also given up on cassava after 10 years of bad harvests due to the "cancer" and other pests and diseases such as mealy bug and cassava green mite. But the varieties given to him at Kizimbazi research station for testing excited him and motivated him to resume growing the crop. It's a decision he says he has not regretted.

Suleiman says his involvement in the project has turned his life around. Farming for him is now a serious business. He estimates that he makes profits of between 50 and 100 percent from his cassava, depending on the season, and his income increased more than four times. "Before the training, I did not know agriculture was a business. I did not know whether I made a profit or a loss. Now, I know how much cassava I have planted, the cost of labor and manure, how much I expect to harvest, and how much profit I will make," he said. "I am now able to save some money in the bank and my life is less stressful. I even bought a color TV to be able to follow the World Cup!"

Yet there is still a big gap to fill before all the farmers on Zanzibar can enjoy the new cassava varieties. According to Salma Omar Mohamed, a research officer with Kizimbani Research station, only some 10,000 farmers are currently growing these new varieties, out of a potential of more than 1 million. She says the business model of distributing the planting materials has excluded poor farmers who are not able to afford the materials. However, she was thankful for the strides made with funding from donors such as Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which supported the free distribution of planting materials to poor farmers under a voucher program.

Mohamed hopes they can get more such support to spread the improved varieties to all the farmers on Zanzibar and on neighboring Pemba Island, where the disease is also prevalent and penetration of the new varieties is even lower.

IITA cassava breeders report that hope is also on the way for farmers in Kenya, mainland Tanzania, and Uganda, as 15 promising cassava varieties that are suitable for the climatic conditions of these areas are in the last testing stages.

Catherine Njuguna is a communication officer with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about food security developments through innovations such as crop breeding.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.   

 

The following op-ed appeared in The Seattle Times.

For most Seattle residents, global hunger seems like an impossible problem to solve. Reports of famine in Niger or the thousands at risk for starvation and malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, seem not only far away but impossible to change. A local organization, however, begs to differ.

The Seattle-based Bridges to Understanding uses digital technology to empower and connect children around the world. Students participating in the Bridges curriculum are taught to use cameras and editing software to develop stories about their community and culture. These videos, comprised of a photo slide show with a running narration, are then shared with the Bridges online community, which is made up of schools in seven countries around the world.

For many students, it's the first time they have ever even held a camera.

"At first, the prospect of designing, shooting and editing a movie seems insurmountable but then they produce these beautiful films," says Elizabeth Sewell, Bridges Program Manager at the Rural Development Foundation's (RDF) primary school in Kalleda, a small village in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh, India. "And then you knock down that barrier, you show them what they are capable of doing. And then they can start to approach other, larger and more institutional, problems the same way. Suddenly, in their own eyes, there are no limits to what they can achieve."

Since the 1980s, international investment in agriculture has decreased significantly. These cuts have impacted women and children the most. But in addition to making sure we reverse these trends, we need to ensure that funding is used effectively - reaching the farmers who need it most.

Who better to consult - and to equip with the tools to help out - in the global effort to combat hunger than the youth, women and farmers who will most benefit from it?

In South Africa, the organization Food and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network is using theater to engage leaders, service providers and policymakers; encourage community participation; and research the needs of women farmers through a project called Theatre for Policy Advocacy. Popular theater personalities travel to communities in Mozambique and Malawi and stage performances using scripts based on the network's research, to engage members of the community.

After each performance, community members, women, men, youth, local leaders are engaged in facilitated dialogues. The dialogues give all community members - especially women - a chance to openly talk about the challenges they are facing without upsetting the status quo, empowering them to speak about what they need from aid groups and their community.

In Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Mali, and other countries around the world, the Africa Rice Centre is using farmer-made instructional videos to help rice farmers share various new methods of improving rice production with each other. The strong presence of women in the videos also helps local NGOs and extension offices - which tend to be made up mostly of male agents - engage women's groups.

Projects like Bridges, Theatre for Policy Advocacy and Farmer to Farmer Training Videos - that provide a forum for those who might not otherwise have a voice - allow for the spread of important information, empowering the very people who will most benefit from, and can play the largest role in, the alleviation of global hunger and poverty.

They are ready. All they need are the tools.

Danielle Nierenberg is co-project director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Project. Molly Theobald is a research fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.

No longer a mere suggestion of what might be, renewable energy is hitting a tipping point, with far-reaching implications. For the first time, understanding the scale and patterns of renewable energy development has become essential to any full analysis of trends that will shape the global energy economy and the health of the planet.

That is the story told by a new report that the Worldwatch Institute helped research and write: the Renewables Global Status Report 2010. Produced by the REN21 network of governments, NGOs, and industry associations, the report paints a remarkable picture of a booming new economic sector that has powered its way through a deep global recession, emerging stronger than ever. 

Buoyed by hundreds of new government energy policies, accelerating private investment, and myriad technology advances over the past five years, renewable energy is breaking into the mainstream of energy markets. Over the past two years, the United States and Europe have both added more power capacity from renewables than from coal, gas, and nuclear combined, according to the report. Worldwide, renewables accounted for one-third of the new generating capacity added.

Renewable energy, including hydropower, now provides 18 percent of total net electricity generation worldwide. Meanwhile, biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are making inroads in the transportation fuels market and are now equal to about 5 percent of world gasoline production. And in China, more than 150 million people heat at least some of their water using solar hot water systems.

The economic weight of the renewable energy sector is now large enough to attract many of the world's largest and most powerful companies, from GE and Siemens to unlikely players such as Samsung and Google. Renewable energy investment of $150 billion worldwide in 2009 was the equivalent of nearly 40 percent of annual investment in the upstream oil and gas industry, which topped $380 billion.

Changes in government policy are responsible for most of these advances. In 2009 alone, 10 national and state governments enacted policies giving renewable power generation access to the grid at prices set by policymakers, bringing the number of governments with such policies to 70. Altogether, the number of countries with policies to encourage renewable energy has increased from 55 in 2005 to 100 in 2010. 

One of the forces motivating new renewable energy policies is the desire to create new industries and jobs. Employment in the renewables sector now numbers in the hundreds of thousands in several countries. In Germany, which has led renewable energy development for more than a decade, more than 300,000 people were employed in renewables industries in 2009. This figure almost equals the number of jobs in the country's largest manufacturing sector: automobiles.

The changing geography of renewable energy is another indicator that we are entering a new era, with the growing geographic diversity boosting confidence that renewables are no longer vulnerable to political shifts in just a few countries. It is also clear that leadership is shifting decisively from Europe to Asia, with China, India, and South Korea among the countries that have stepped up their commitments to renewable energy.

This transition reflects a growing recognition within Asia itself that these oil-short countries have much to gain from the development of renewable energy in economic, environmental, and security terms. For the world as a whole, this is a momentous development, since Asian nations now lead the growth in carbon emissions. Given East Asia's dominance of low-cost global manufacturing, the region's commitment to renewable energy will almost certainly drive down the price of many renewable energy devices in the coming years.

Renewable energy is also beginning to make a dent in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In Germany, renewables displaced 109 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2009 - equivalent to 12 percent of the country's total - helping to reduce domestic emissions 29 percent from the 1990 level.

At a time when the world's energy headlines are dominated by an oil-stained Gulf of Mexico and failure of the U.S. Senate to act on climate change, renewable energy is a rare good news story. The momentum that renewables have gained in a relatively short time indicates that with modest policy changes, a very different energy system could begin to emerge over the next decade.

Our congratulations to Worldwatch Senior Fellows Janet Sawin and Eric Martinot, who co-directed the Renewables Global Status Report 2010. They and their many contributors from around the globe have provided a surprisingly clear picture of an energy economy in motion. The optimistic picture they paint offers inspiration to those who despair of the energy headlines in recent months.

Christopher Flavin is President of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Center for African Studies and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First), has worked for, and later rallied against, the World Bank and World Trade Organization. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing. In an interview with Worldwatch research intern Ronit Ridberg, the award-winning writer, activist, and academic shares his views on food sovereignty and global agricultural policies.

What is food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?

Food sovereignty is about communities', states', and unions' rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you're actually not making a policy demand, you're just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that's a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They've always been imposed.

That's why La Via Campesina, the organization that really invented the term, says that one of the visions behind food sovereignty is that food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women. That may sound like something not at all to do with food, but of course, if we're serious about people being able to make choices about how their food comes to them and what the food system looks like, then the physical and structural violence to which women are exposed in the home, in the economy, and in society all need to be tackled. Otherwise we will continue with a situation in which 60 percent of the people going hungry today are women or girls. So food sovereignty, to boil it down, is really about power - who has it in the food system and how to redistribute it so that those who have concentrated it have it taken away from them.

In terms of specific policies, what Via Campesina is calling for is for agriculture to be removed from the World Trade Organization, which is a way again in which local countries' sovereignty is already been given away. They also call for large corporations to be booted out of agriculture. There's strong opposition to Monsanto, for example, and the way that they've been behaving in many developing countries, and many Via Campesina members are campaigning against Monsanto in their home countries.

Will another Green Revolution or more food subsidies help reduce hunger?

To answer the question, let's look at Malawi. It's the poster child for what a new Green Revolution in Africa might look like, with widespread subsidies of inorganic fertilizer for farmers. When I went there, late last year, what you found was long lines at the gasoline pump, because all Malawi's foreign exchange had been spent on importing this fossil fuel-based fertilizer. The country had bankrupted itself in order that it might be a showcase for the new Green Revolution in Africa. And of course, there are alternatives right there in Malawi, driven by farmers, invariably by women who are innovating around sustainable systems like polyculture - growing lots of crops simultaneously together, building soil fertility for the long run.

What this shows is that there are some basic incompatibilities between varieties of ways of addressing agrarian problems in Africa. Some organizations, Worldwatch included, adopt a "big tent" approach, in which solutions that keep the status quo but improve it marginally sit alongside far more radical approaches. Ultimately, you can't promote genetically modified monoculture or techniques that make large-scale commercial farming less destructive at the same time as wanting something like food sovereignty, which calls for much more of a deeper structural rethink of the way the food system operates. Food sovereignty is about democracy in our food system so that everyone gets to eat; industrial agriculture involves a food system run by technocrats for profit. At the end of the day, you can have one or the other - not both.

[Editor's Note: Worldwatch has a long history of writing about sustainable agriculture systems that encourage crop diversity and support the livelihoods of small-scale farmers. Those reports have documented evidence that genetically modified crops are not necessarily the best, most appropriate, or only available solution to agricultural challenges. Visit the Nourishing the Planet blog for a more detailed response from our team of agriculture researchers.]

How does global agricultural policy affect small-scale farmers across the world?

In general, the policies foisted on developing countries through organizations like the World Bank is that large-scale agriculture is the way to go: that small farmers are a relic of the past. They are of purely cultural significance but economically, socially, and agriculturally, they stand in the way of development. So the policies that are essentially designed to increase farm size and kick off rural populations to the cities are ones that you see in pretty much every country around the world. And yet of course, it is the poor in rural communities that are being forced to bear the brunt of these policies, and these are the communities that are least able to afford it. And again-you can never say it too often - it is on women's shoulders that the bulk of the pain of moving from agrarian society to a so-called modern industrial society, falls.

Why should American food consumers care about the fate of agricultural producers halfway across the world?

Not out of any sense of pity or charity, but because the struggles that farmers in developing countries face are very similar to the struggles that farmers in the United States face. Industrial agriculture wreaks havoc. We've seen the deaths from E. coli, we've seen industrial agriculture and the rise of BSE [mad cow disease], we've seen the massive dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico because of the runoff from animal feeding operations flowing down the Mississippi. If you're in America and you're concerned about the quality or safety of your food, or about the consequences of the way your food is produced, then you're not alone. Those are all things that farmers elsewhere in the world are worried about, and that consumers elsewhere in the world are worried about too.

There's a proven way in which those concerns can be addressed. It is to wrench power away from the corporations that profit from low standards, from the ability to create offshore pollution, and the ability to evade the costs of defective products. So I think in the U.S., if you're at all concerned about food safety, health, obesity-any of these things-then you would want to have more control over your food system. And wanting more control over your food system is exactly what food sovereignty is about. In a globalized world, you can't have control over your food system in this country while people elsewhere don't, and this is what makes it a common struggle.

Funding for agricultural research has declined in recent decades. Where should funding for agricultural innovation and research come from?

Funding for agriculture ought to come from the places where research used to come from: the government. I don't have any stars in my eyes when I think about governments in developing countries having a ton of cash in their coffers for research into this. But governments that are net food-importing developing countries found themselves after the last food crisis in very dark times. They're keen to develop new ways of doing things.

A lot of these countries haven't had the money to be able to invest in agricultural extension and research, and so what we need are two things: one is a cancellation of the illegitimate debt that these countries have racked up with organizations like the World Bank. There's a huge debt that rich countries owe poor ones-for colonialism, for the ecological damage we have caused and continue to cause by the way we consume. Yet through the World Bank, the debt has been flipped over, and has become an agent for controlling these economies.

So we definitely need a change in the way international development and finance work. But we also need to support change within developing countries so that agricultural extension becomes something that once again is funded and is geared toward the kinds of research that is about low-carbon, that is about democratic control over resources, rather than about pushing a particular kind of product and particular kind of vision of agriculture that is ultimately unsustainable for the majority of countries in Africa.

Ronit Ridberg is a research intern with the Worldwatch Institute. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about food sovereignty and fair trade.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

  
The prospects of Congressional reauthorization of a multi-year surface transportation bill in the United States-already many months overdue-appear dim this year. Identifying funding sources is one of the major stumbling blocks, and legislators seem to lack a vision of what 21st-century mobility entails. They might gain inspiration from developments in France.

On July 9, the French government released a draft plan for transportation infrastructure investments (called "avant-projet au schéma national des infrastructures de transports") over the next two decades. If the priorities hold, it will represent nothing less than an "adieu" to decades of car-centered development.

Of €170 billion ($220 billion) in planned spending, €85 billion-50 percent-will be allocated to high-speed rail, and €53 billion-31 percent-to urban trams, subways, and bus lines. That's a whopping 81 percent of transportation spending for public transport! Roads and airports, by contrast, will receive only a combined 5 percent, with the remainder going to ports and waterways.

By 2020, a total of 2,300 kilometers of new high-speed rail (HSR) lines are to be built, with another 1,500 kilometers planned by 2030. (See map.) Urban mass-transit lines are to be expanded fivefold to a total of 1,800 kilometers. It is expected that the overall plan will reduce the annual carbon dioxide emissions of France's transportation sector, currently at 30 million tons, by 2 million tons.

But, as the newspaper Les Echos comments, the plan does not specify how the French government will finance the plan-through taxes, user fees, borrowing, or other measures, including the mobilization of private investments-which raises some questions about the overall viability of the plan.

Financing could also prove somewhat of an Achilles heel of ambitious Spanish plans. Spain currently has the largest high-speed rail construction program in Europe and, at 1,614 kilometers, already has the second-longest HSR track in Europe after France. Plans call for a total of 10,000 kilometers built by 2020, meaning that Spain will add more than three times the additional capacity envisioned under the already ambitious French plan by the same date.

The 2004 Strategic Plan for Infrastructures and Transport (PEIT) calls for 44 percent of total transportation investment by 2020 to be directed toward rail, primarily for expansion of the high-speed network. Between 2005 and 2020, some $152 billion is to be invested in rail, with $115 billion going to high-speed routes.

By 2010, with the country deeply mired in the global recession, the Spanish government turned to infrastructure investments, especially in rail, as a way to stimulate the economy. Its two-year Extraordinary Infrastructure Plan, rolled out in April 2010, promised to invest some $22 billion in transportation, with 70 percent going to rail and 30 percent to highways. High-speed rail tracks will see about $8 billion in new investment in 2010 alone. This latter amount is about as much as the U.S. stimulus program (ARRA) makes available for high-speed rail. Per capita, however, it's almost 7 times as much.

Given high levels of public debt, initial investments in projects will be made by construction companies and financial institutions, rather than the government. The government will begin to pay companies for their work starting in 2014, after projects are completed. Government spending is to be financed by a new tax on users of the infrastructure.

While a warm bienvenue and bienvenido is being extended to rail in these two European countries, the United States still struggles to offer its own welcome mat. The existing U.S. intercity rail network is fragmented, plans for the future are far less sweeping, and funding remains uncertain.

Gary Gardner and Michael Renner are senior researchers with the Worldwatch Institute. They can be reached at mrenner@worldwatch.org .

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog Green Economy. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org