Category Archives: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Looking beyond the crises: A new agenda for peace

by Jim Hodgson

For years, I have gathered and often shared the stories of how people organize for a better future for their communities and the planet. A few days ago, I started gathering articles as they appeared about the ecological crisis.

And I am alarmed – though the rational part of my brain reminds me that I have long-known of the intersection of ecological disaster with civil conflict and war. 

In 1971, I was 13 when I attended my first demonstration. It was about peace and the environment: opposing the third in a series of U.S. nuclear tests at Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands between Alaska and Siberia. Again today, war and ongoing failure to respect ecology bring us closer to collapse. A previous test in 1969 gave rise to the Don’t Make A Wave Committee in Vancouver. The group became the global movement Greenpeace. (Photo: an old clipping from the Summerland Review, November 1971).

Addressing the UN General Assembly a week ago, Secretary General António Guterres pointed to the two canals most vital to world trade and management of supply chains.

Trade via the Panama Canal is down 36 per cent in the past month because of low water levels – a consequence of the climate crisis. 

Trade via the Suez Canal is down by 42 per cent, since the start of Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea more than three months ago. Those attacks in turn are a foreseeable consequence of the excessive – many argue “genocidal” – Israeli response to the Hamas-led attack on Israeli civilians from the Gaza strip last Oct. 7.

The Pressenza news service reports this week that for the first time on record, the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degree Celsius over a 12-month period, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Last month was also the warmest January globally since C3S records began in 1950, with an average air surface temperature 0.7 degrees Celsius higher than the January average from 1991 to 2020.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report published Feb. 9 in the journal Science Advances. Such collapse could lead to further sea level rise and cause temperatures to plunge dramatically in Europe and rise in the southern hemisphere.

A new UN report shows that about 44 per cent of migratory species worldwide are declining in population. More than a fifth of the nearly 1,200 species monitored by the UN are threatened with extinction.

In Mexico, prolonged drought led to sharp drops in production of corn and avocados last year. Lack of rainfall has affected water reservoirs used for agriculture. Across the country, water storage is at 42.7 per cent of normal, and down 34.8 per cent from 2022. This is leading producers to plant less in the winter 2023-24 season. Images from La Jornada: (left) “corn production dropped 40 per cent because of the drought;” (centre) “Monarch butterflies occupy 59.3 per cent less surface area than the previous year because of climate impacts;” (right) “Industrial activity in Iztapalapa (the east side of Mexico City) could be paralyzed for lack of water.”

In January, Mexico’s national weather service reported that 2023 was the driest in 82 years, with just 21.1 per cent of normal rainfall. Last year also saw the largest amount of land afflicted by wildfires.

The Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas has published an interactive map where you look at drought risks in any part of the planet. Half of Mexico and large parts of the western United States are in red, along with most of northern Alberta. 

Raúl Zibechi, the Uruguayan observer of social movements in Latin America, published a column recently that examined these and other risks.

“We continue to be stuck in the minuteness (‘chiquitismo’) of consumerist and narcissist daily life,” he wrote – “the latest telephone or clothing; the football game where we are merely spectators; the electoral campaign that only entertains, but does not resolve anything profound. This is the strategic triumph of capitalism: taking us headlong toward collapse while we look at the screen, ignoring the destruction and massacre of life.”

Views from Corpus Christi, Texas, June 2007. (Photos: Jim Hodgson)

In the speech by António Guterres that I noted above, he denounced the wars and ecological destruction, and offered some signs of ways forward. He spoke of A New Agenda for Peace.

“Peace is a rallying cry,” he said. “It is a call to action.” And he went on to describe the actions that must be taken: ceasefires, negotiations, addressing causes of migration, protection of species, debt and development finance, real action on climate, and reform of UN systems including the Security Council.

“We must also make peace with the planet. Humanity has waged a war we can only lose: our war with nature,” Guterres said. “For my part, I can guarantee that I will never give up pushing for peace.”

Turning the world upside down: systemic change needed now

Photo: Granma.cu

by Jim Hodgson

In the face of deep inequality within and among the nations of the world, leaders of the so-called “less developed countries” find they must still appeal for basic fairness from their richer neighbours.

More than 75 years after the United Nations was formed, and almost that long since the first development programs were implemented (e.g., the Colombo Plan, 1950), and almost 60 years since the first gathering of the Group of 77 developing nations, leaders gathered last week in Havana and this week in New York to plead their case again.

Not that you would have read about the Havana meeting in mainstream media, but representatives from 114 countries attended the G77+China meeting in Havana. Among them were 30 heads of state or government, as well as senior officials from international organisations and agencies, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The meeting was held under the banner title, “Current development challenges: The role of science, technology and innovation,” but the talk was all about the systems of wealth and power that are rigged against developing countries.

In their final declaration Sept. 16, the G77 demanded fair “access to health-related measures, products and technologies” – a problem highlighted by “vaccine apartheid” during the Covid pandemic when richer countries had first access to vaccines. 

G77 called for an end to “existing disparities between developed and developing countries in terms of conditions, possibilities and capacities to produce new scientific and technological knowledge.”

They revived calls for a “new international economic order” and “new financial architecture,” including “through increasing the representation of developing countries in global decision and policy-making bodies which will contribute to enhance the capacities of developing countries to access and develop science, technology and innovation.”

Among the countries participating (including the host, Cuba) were several that have been harmed by sanctions that are usually imposed by wealthier countries to try to provoke changed behaviour by less powerful countries. Sanctions (referred to in the declaration with the UN Human Rights Council term “unilateral coercive measures”), together with external debt, inflation, displacement of peoples, inequality and “the adverse effects of climate change” are all among the “major challenges generated by the current unfair international economic order” and there is “no clear roadmap so far to address these global problems.”

Criticism of the existing international order carried over from the G77 meeting to the UN General Assembly, which met days later in New York.

“They don’t have the $100 billion to aid countries so that they can defend themselves against floods, storms and hurricanes,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro, referring to the Loss and Damage Fund promoted at the COP climate negotiations to “new and additional” funding from donor nations.

Wars and climate change, he said, are related to that other unprecedented crisis: migration. “The exodus of people toward the north is measured with excessive precision in the size of the failure of governments. This past year has been a time of defeat for governments, of defeat for humanity.”

The political systems that we use to effect policy changes are failing to respond to the urgent needs of our time. Most politicians are beholden to the corporations and rich people who fund their political parties and perpetuate their hegemony. In four-to-six year electoral cycles, the deep changes needed to confront those problems are rarely undertaken. 

In Canada, think of the power that mining corporations have wielded to block meaningful investigation of human rights and environmental abuses by their subsidiaries overseas. Or the influence land speculators have over the Ontario government. Or the actions of oil, gas, coal and pipeline companies to stall meaningful action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

And then scale that up globally. Think of the ways pharmaceutical companies blocked access to HIV and AIDS medications until a global fund was found to pay them – and then pulled the same stunt over Covid vaccines. At the UN on Sept. 20, Guterres said time was running short for climate action thanks to the “naked greed” of fossil fuel interests.

What is delivered through Official Development Assistance and Sustainable Development Goals may be crumbs and band-aids. While necessary, those funds are not sufficient to counter instruments of power like corporations and their allies in the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Political change is required to make the systems change.

As Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras, told the G77 in Havana: “The time has come to put an end to the backyards [using a U.S. term referring to its relationship to Latin America] because we are not pieces on a chessboard of those who are apologists for dependence. Our nations should not continue to suffer the mass privatization of their territories.”

Mafalda: But Liberty, you’ve put the map upside down!
Liberty: Upside down compared to what? Earth is in space where there is no up or down.
Liberty: That story that says the north has to be above is a psychological trick invented by those on the top to make those who are on the bottom continue to believe that we are the bottom. But, beginning today, conventional ideas are over!
Last panel, a voice: Where were you, Mafalda?
Mafalda: I don’t know, but a conventional idea has taken a blow.

(For that last line, Quino, the great Argentinian cartoonist who created Mafalda, wrote in the original Spanish version, “No lo sé, pero algo acaba de sanseacabarse” – the sense being that something has ended.)

Systemic failure of global finance demands system change

by Jim Hodgson

If, as UN secretary general Antonio Guterres has said, the excessive debts of impoverished countries represent a “systemic failure,” then the solution would be reform of the system.

And so, for at least five decades, UN agencies, development NGOs and global justice activists like me have talked about a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO) or reform of the “international financial architecture.”

Left: media coverage of the summit was mixed; right: Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, 2021.

The latest tilt at the windmill of reform came in June from French President Emmanuel Macron working together with Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. They invited world leaders to Paris June 22-23 to come up with a new “global pact” to fund the struggle to overcome poverty and human-caused climate change.

“What is required of us now is absolute transformation – and not reform – of our institutions,” said Mottley in her opening address. Mottley had earlier worked with other Global South nations to propose what is called the Bridgetown Initiative – a plan for changes to governance, policy and practice of North-controlled international financial institutions.

What followed, however, showed a “wide chasm” between what the Global South needs and what the Global North is willing to concede, said Iolanda Fresnillo, policy and advocacy manager for debt justice at Eurodad, an NGO focussing on debt and development.

Images from the first years of our new millennium: a Lula campaign billboard in Brazil; a mural in Buenos Aires protesting the 2001-02 economic crisis.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva, insisted that leaders address global inequality. 

“It is not possible that, in a meeting between presidents of important countries, the word inequality does not appear: wage inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, inequality in education, inequality in health. In other words, we are in an increasingly unequal world, and wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer people, and poverty is increasingly concentrated in the hands of more people.”

With changes to taxation and provision of pensions, Brazil had lifted 36 million people out of poverty by 2010, he said. But after Jair Bolsonaro left office, 33 million were once again in poverty. Lula pledged to take steps again to improve the lot of the impoverished, to overcome deforestation in the Amazon and other forest regions of Brazil, and to collaborate with other governments for the sake of forests, climate and equity.

This August, Brazil will host a meeting of South American countries that share the Amazon basin. It’s a step toward 2025, when the Brazilian state of Pará will be the seat of that year’s climate negotiations, COP 30. Pará is where the Amazon River reaches the Atlantic Ocean.

But Lula also decried the ineffectiveness of global institutions that cannot enforce climate action and that represent the world as it existed in the late 1940s. “We cannot continue with institutions that work in the wrong way,” he said.

Western leaders “snub” Macron summit

Other than Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was the only G7 leader to attend. Canada was represented by then-International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan. (Sajjan was moved away from the development portfolio in the July 26 cabinet shuffle and replaced by Ahmed Hussen.)

But one searches in vain to find media commentary on Sajjan’s participation, and must turn instead to a government news release to find out what he said or did:

“While at the summit, Minister Sajjan participated in several high-level events, including an event on the key challenges, opportunities and tools required to achieve a new feminist financial architecture, as well as an event on increasing global investment in education to catalyze sustainable development. He also took part in a discussion on improving access to financing for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) through the Bridgetown Initiative and the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index. This discussion was particularly important to the Minister given his role of small states champion under the UN-Commonwealth Joint Advocacy Strategy for Small States. The Minister emphasized his commitment to amplifying the priorities of SIDS and helping to find solutions that work for them, particularly on climate vulnerabilities.”

Sajjan also announced that that Canada will invest $50 million in something called the BlueOrchard Latin America and the Caribbean Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion Fund “to increase access to financing for women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-Descendants and other underserved groups in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

BlueOrchard, the government news release explains, is “a member of the Schroders Group” and “a pioneer in the growing field of impact investing.” (Impact investing is defined elsewhere as an extension of socially responsible investing, and “goes a step further” by actively seeking investments that can create a significant impact.)

After a bit of digging, one learns that BlueOrchard Finance is a Swiss-based investment company that has been working in Latin America since 2007. It specializes in microfinance. “The strategy has financed 400,000 micro-entrepreneurs across 13 countries” in Latin America and the Caribbean. in 2019, BlueOrchard had about $3.5 billion in assets under management.

This is not the same as cooperatives, credit unions or even the microcredit “economy of solidarity”-style initiatives with which I have been involved in Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala and El Salvador. And it’s not about systemic change. 

“Feminist financial architecture” and other good intentions aside, Canada and the other wealthy nations are part of a continuing failure to finance the fight against impoverishment and climate change. 

Some among us have proposed changes to the global financial architecture for a very long time….

A post-script. Global South leaders do not see issues in the same way that their Global North counterparts see them. In Brussels a few weeks after the Paris summit, European Union leaders held their first meeting with Latin American leaders in eight years. While the EU pressed for more support for Ukraine, Latin Americans led by Lula pressed for dialogue and questioned new European demands ahead of a potential new trade deal. In the end, the joint statement could only say that the ongoing war is causing immense human suffering and increasing the global economy’s real vulnerabilities.