Some development organisations, journalists and government officials celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol with a giant birthday cake. Spirits were high as many seemed content with the progress made since COP-12, and the potential for a post-2012 treaty.

But though the cake may have been sweet for COP-13 attendants, life will remain bitter for the majority of the worlds poor who are set to lose heavily from a post-2012 deal.

As Barun Mitra of Indias Liberty Institute, one of the 42 members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, explains:

The problem facing hundreds of millions of poor people throughout the world is not that they consume too much, but that they hardly have any reliable and efficient sources of energy, clean water or a secure supply of food. All of these will be jeopardized in a world that is made much poorer through a post-2012 agreement which essentially inhibits economic growth.

To expect or ask that the poor sacrifice today for the sake of the rich tomorrow is not only immoral, but it also ignores the plight of poverty faced by millions today.

Though activists claim to be acting on behalf of the poor, the measures they propose would only cause harm. Instead of such hyperbole, we need to consider why countries like India have created abundance from scarcity and have adapted to changing circumstances. After the major famine of 1965-66 which killed 1.5 million people, India was considered a basket case. Today, India is poised to become a net food exporter. The improvement in Indias agriculture was due to a number of factors, including:

• access to new technologies such as hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals, and irrigation
• relatively greater market access
• secure land tenure
• vibrant democracy

The situation is no different globally. Worldwide, in the past 50 years, agricultural yields have improved year on year. Fundamentally, this demonstrates that activists utterly fail to understand that given the chance, people are able to raise themselves out of poverty.

If governments really care about the present and future of the worlds 800 million undernourished people, they would take the costless and effective steps of removing trade and regulatory barriers that only serve to make food and associated technologies far more costly. Tragically for their poorest citizens, Sub-Saharan African countries worry about the impact of climate change – but continue to apply an average import tariff of 33.6% on agricultural imports.

The cake and policies wheeled out in Bali will hardly help the hungry or the poor. The way forwards is home-grown adaptation through technology and trade, which will allow people to raise themselves out of poverty.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Press Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.