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I have an appalling memory. Birthdays, anniversaries, appointments, I’ve forgotten them all. The only poem I’ve ever been able to commit to memory (the only one that’s fit to print, at any rate) is this one by William Blake. It’s beautiful, haunting, a little too chilling for a candlelit dinner, but entirely appropriate for today’s February 14th posting:

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This Valentines, stay off the roses.

Not only are they pumped full of some of the nastiest agricultural chemicals, the people who grow and pick them likely have a fairly raw deal. As Alexandra Early, the writer of this lovely little article in the Boston Globe, learned when she went to Bogotá

“our domestic expressions of affection — which reach their largest volume on Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day — require painful, low-paid labor by a global workforce that’s largely female.

“Whether young or old, [the workforce] complained about the lack of protective equipment and clothing, which leaves them exposed to pesticides in the fields and to the fungicides that flowers are dipped in prior to shipment. They say the chemicals cause widespread headaches, asthma, nausea, and impaired vision. The repetitive tasks and long hours in assembly-line jobs have also left many flower workers with painful carpal tunnel injuries.”

The invisible worm in this story, the company behind it all, is Dole. Better known for its fruit, Dole also happens to be the largest importer and marketer of flowers in North America, and the largest fresh flower producer in Latin America, with its own daily charter flights of flowers, providing consumers in the North with flowers from thorn trees in the Global South.

Dole has, however, decided that wages in Latin America are too high, and that Chinese workers and flowers might prove more profitable. As a result “Dole recently announced the closing of its Splendor plantation, blaming the lay off of one-third of its Colombian workforce”. When the production of cut flowers moves to China, workers, mainly women, there will face exactly the same environmental and health problems as their counterparts in South America.

What is one to do? One could, as Alexandra Early suggests, buy flowers that carry the “VeriFlora” label. It’s ‘Fair Trade’ for flowers, a certification which promises some adherence to local labour regulations and organic environmental standards.

Another response is to swear off imported and mass produced cut flowers altogether. It’s a response worth taking seriously.

In many ways, flowers are like ivory. When you see them in the shops, you know that there’s little way they were produced in a way consonant with environmental and social good practice. Even if the flowers were picked by millionaires, plucking buds from manure-strewn open fields where they were about to die of natural causes anyway, the flowers would still have to be flown all the way here. And there’s no way of avoiding that (nor do any of the standards seek to address it).

It’s something of which the industry is well aware. My partner’s office, for instance, formed a committee to make sure their office supplies, including cut flowers, were being purchased with minimal damage to the environment. They asked the flower guy what he recommended they buy. His response: “potted plants”. And so that’s what they’ve got – and their office still looks grand.

More seriously, the issue of ‘fair trade’ is one that deserves a bit more critical scrutiny than many have been prepared to give it.

Of course the people who work in agriculture, the people who are the world’s poorest, deserve a better income. Of course the wages paid by most agricultural corporations are unconscionable. Of course, people must earn more money.

The question is whether locking rural people into producing fripperies for the rich is the best way of doing it. And that’s precisely what one does when one promotes the pesticide-soaked jet-sent cut flowers industry, whether in its rapacious Dole-shaped form, or its more guilt-friendly ‘VeriFlora’ form.

To argue for ‘fairly traded’ cut-flowers is still to say “yes, I want these things. I want the economy of places in the Global South to produce them for me. I’m prepared to pay a little over the odds, but I’m not prepared fundamentally to take a step back and see whether my desire for cut flowers isn’t in some way contributing to the problem of poverty where they’re grown.”

It’s hard to argue that the cut flower industry is the cure to poverty in Colombia. It’s an argument, of course, that has been made by development agencies, and Dole itself. It’s an argument that’s rather undermined with Dole fucks off to China when it realises that it can get the same goods for less elsewhere.

What fair trade, at the end of the day, fails to understand is that there’s an opportunity cost to growing flowers, or indeed to any other attempt to ‘develop’ a population by paying it a bit more to export its agricultural produce.

By creating a honey-trap of a single, slightly-more-lucrative-than-anything-else crop (whether that’s flowers or corn or coffee), ‘fair trade’ forgoes the chance to re-examine how rural economies might be structured differently. Rather than exporting flowers, the best way to bring wealth to rural areas might be a combination of debt relief, land reform, agroecological farming and local industry. But not only does Fair Trade postpone a discussion about a social and political alternative, it doesn’t bring the discussion remotely closer to happening. It forgets about it completely.

Instead, ‘fair trade’ is simultaneously an act of charity and of amnesia (see a previous post for an example of charity at its worst). It’s a charity that keeps poverty at bay, but that forgets to address its root causes. And the problem with ‘fair trade’, whether it’s VeriFlora certification or anything else, is that it’s being sold as precisely a cure for poverty.

But ‘fair trade’ isn’t a cure for poverty. It’s a band aid, a temporary patch.

One argument against forswearing flowers is that it will leave workers without jobs. It’s an argument that more or less exactly demonstrates the arrogance of ‘fair trade’ – either workers produce for us, or they’ll have nothing.

Yet workers in Colombia are already organising for more comprehensive agricultural transformation, despite the government’s best efforts to stop them. But the one thing they’re not fighting for is ‘fair trade’. Why? Because it is a solution with thorns. One that deserves to wither and drop. And one that can very adequately be replaced with a self-sustaining and more vibrant programme instead.

So, this Valentines, remember to say it with potted plants.

There are, however, more sensible ideas. Here’s some analysis curated by Dan Moshenberg that reinstates that most hidden perspective in disaster – gender. More below the fold.

First, as poet activist Shailja Patel has posted, there’s a progressive action plan for Haiti:

Haiti: 10-point action plan
1) Grants, not loans.
2) Keep corporations and corporatist policies OUT. Stop disaster capitalism in its tracks.
3) Cancel ALL Haiti’s debt to the Inter-American Development Bank.
4) Let Aristide return to Haiti.
5) Lift the ban on Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas political party.
6) Rip up the neoliberal pre-earthquake Clinton-Obama program for Haiti: tourism, sweatshops, privatization, deregulation.
7) Do not allow US military or UN “peacekeepers” to point guns at desperate Haitians.
8 ) Allow all Haitians in the US to work, and remit money home.
9) Release all 30,000 Haitians held in US jails for deportation, and grant them Temporary Protected Status.
10) Demand that France start repaying the $21 billion it extorted from Haiti in 1825, to “compensate” France for loss of Haiti as a slave colony.”:

Then, a question about what to send to Haiti….

Formula for disaster

In the wake of Tuesday’s catastrophic earthquake, Twitter has been inundatedwith calls for donations of baby formula to send to Haiti. One frequently re-tweeted message relayed an urgent, all-caps plea from a friend on-the-ground: “WE R DESPERATE 4 BABY FORMULA, NIPPLES/BOTTLES … .” Meanwhile, a much smaller rival campaign has been underway: “Please don’t send powdered formula to Haiti!” tweeted a doula in Long Beach, Calif. Later, a breast-feeding activist from Ontario, Canada wrote: “PLEASE! don’t send formula to Haiti! The women&children shouldn’t be victimised twice! Breastfeeding during emergencies is VITAL to health.” Well, which is it? ….The main issue with dry baby formula is fairly intuitive: It has to be mixed with water, which raises the risk of contamination. Access to water is always a concern following major disasters; and it was an issue in Haiti even before the country’s basic infrastructure was flattened. Even given a water source, very few Haitians will have “the place to boil the water to make it safe,” says Marie St. Cyr, an activist and former director of the Haitian Coalition on AIDS, and few will have the resources to sterilize bottles and safely prepare and store the formula. Formula-feeding in such stark conditions can bring about infection, diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition and death, according to UNICEF….Breast-feeding is not only clean and safe, but formula simply can’t compare to human milk’s nutritious benefits and its ability to fight off illness. “: http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/15/haiti_baby_formula/index.html.

Finally, the question of who to send your money to….

After the Quake, Depend on Women

New America Media, Commentary, Marie St. Cyr and Yifat Susskind ,
Posted: Jan 15, 2010 Review it on NewsTrust

Editor’s Note: MADRE , an international women’s human rights group, is working with the Haitian relief organization, Zanmi Lasante, to bring humanitarian aid into the country overland from the Dominican Republic.

If you want to help alleviate the suffering in Haiti, give your money to the women.

In the wake of disasters like the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti, it can be comforting to see big international agencies taking charge of relief and reconstruction efforts. No doubt international agencies—with their resources, know-how, heavy machinery, and access to government—have a critical role to play. But large-scale relief operations are not always best suited to meet the needs of those who are made most vulnerable by disaster, namely, women and their children.

Women in Haiti have been made vulnerable for a constellation of reasons. First, the Haitian population at large has been buffeted by forces beyond their control for generations. Harmful and manipulative international economic policies, like unfair U.S. agricultural subsidies, disadvantage local farmers and undermine Haitian self-sufficiency. In 2008, Haiti was slammed by a succession of four hurricanes, spreading destruction from which it had yet to fully recover. All this means that Haiti’s infrastructure was weak, poverty was rampant, and people had little access to much-needed social services.

Then, the earthquake struck.

All Haitians are suffering right now. But, women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters. Women are also overwhelmingly responsible for other vulnerable people, including infants, children, the elderly, and people who are ill or disabled.

Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the “head of household” approach, women-headed families may not even be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.

It is not enough to ensure that women receive aid. Women in communities must also be integral to designing and carrying out relief efforts. When relief is distributed by women, it has the best chance of reaching those most in need. That’s not because women are morally superior. It is because their roles as caretakers in the community means they know where every family lives, which households have new babies or disabled elders, and how to reach remote communities even in disaster conditions.

Moreover, women in the community have expertise about the specific problems women and their families face during disasters.

Unfortunately, in big relief operations, already-marginalized people are usually the ones who “fall through the cracks.” After Hurricane Katrina, for example, many battered women didn’t use missing person registries for fear that they would enable their abusers to find them. Women’s organizations, recognizing the documented trend of a surge in violence against women after a disaster, were able to provide community support services for battered women.

Rather than replicating the work of existing organizations, relief and reconstruction programs should leave resources and training in the hands of community women who therefore become better equipped to rebuild their lives and communities on a stronger foundation. What Haiti needs most in the long-term is the resilience that comes from having responsive democratic government and vibrant health, education and social institutions. We must work with women in the wake of this earthquake to build that resilience.

Marie St. Cyr is a MADRE board member and a longtime NYC-based Haitian human rights advocate. Yifat Susskind is MADRE’s policy and communications director.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7b06137c2c1eb819b74036115ba8434b

So what to do? Please give, as my family has, to these organisations – they’ll be helping people in the disaster, and helping a democratic recovery afterward. [Hat tip: Food First.]

Haiti Action

Haiti’s grassroots movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators, human rights activists, support committees for prisoners and agricultural cooperatives – will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. Grassroots organizers are doing what they can with the most limited of funds to make a difference. Please take this opportunity to lend them your support.

http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html

Partners in Health

Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, this nonprofit health delivery program has served Haiti’s poor since 1987. To donate for earthquake relief, go to

https://donate.pih.org/page/contribute/haiti_earthquake?source=earthquak…

In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, Partners in Health clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

Doctors Without Borders was working in Haiti prior to the quake with a staff of 800. Here is a report on January 13, 2009 with a link to their donation page.

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=4148&cat=field-news

Grassroots International

Long time Food First partner Grassroots International has a long history of working with organizations on the ground in Haiti. Grassroots has committed to the extent possible to, “provide cash to our partners to make local purchases of the items they most need and to obtain food from farmers not hit by the disaster.”

http://www.grassrootsonline.org/news/blog/all-hands-responding-haiti-eme…

China’s wealth gap poses threat to stability, warns think tank
Monday, 11 January 2010.
96 per cent of people in China now feel resentful towards the wealthy

chinaworker.info

“There has been an increasing number of mass disturbances occurring in recent years related to the yawning gap between the rich and the poor.” This warning, issued by Yan Ye, vice-professor of the North China Institute of Science and Technology, has made headlines in the state-run media. A number of recent surveys in China point in the same direction. Rapid economic growth which recently saw China overtake Germany as the world’s largest merchandise exporter, has not benefited large sections of the population. Yan’s warning was based on research conducted by the top government think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), into six cases of mass disturbances that broke out in 2008, including the Weng’an incident in Guizhou province, the Sanlu tainted milk scandal and taxi drivers’ strike in Chongqing municipality.

Unequal income among different sectors of the economy topped the reasons behind the threat to the country’s social stability, according to Yan’s research report in the book titled Social Structure of Contemporary China, released last week. The government should strengthen supervision to control “a number of senior managers’ high incomes in monopolistic industries”, Yan said.

“Governmental supervision can influence state-owned enterprises’ policies on protecting employees, but there is no similar supervision mechanism for the increasing number of private enterprises in China,” Lu Xueyi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Daily. “The government needs to, on the one hand, ensure the functioning of market economy, and to promote a just and harmonious society on the other,” said Lu, reflecting a stereotypical view within official circles of what the government should be doing.

The CASS report did not provide figures over the number of ‘mass incidents’ (street protests, strikes and other collective actions), but the trend is evidently upwards. Recorded ‘mass incidents’ were 120,000 in 2008, up from 90,000 in 2006. These statistics are highly sensitive for the regime and therefore since 2007 no official statistics have been published, but some estimates say the tally for 2009 could be 230,000.
In the absence of democratic rights, independent trade unions and other grassroots organisations, with workers and other oppressed groups unable – legally – to fightback against abysmal wages and conditions, then official research institutions such as CASS play the role of an early warning system – to alert China’s one-party dictatorship over potential threats to its tenure. The question is to what extent the ‘communist’ regime is capable of acting upon these warnings – of which there are many – once received.

“China currently continues to be stuck in a phase of frequent conflicts. Social unrest has been on the rise compared to last year,” warned Chen Guangjin, a co-author of the report. “Six of the 10 top environmental protection incidents that have happened in China since 2001 took place in 2009,” Chen said.

In a separate press release, a top agriculture expert Li Xiaoyun said the number of people in China defined as poor would at least triple if not for the use of an antiquated official poverty line. China’s poor actually totals 150 million, if using the internationally accepted 1 US dollar per day guideline, Li said, not the 40 million claimed by the government. Even 150m is an underestimate of the real level of poverty in China. Li estimated that about 20 to 30 percent of the rural population – 140 million to 230 million people – is vulnerable to being driven back to poverty due to sudden sickness, natural disaster or economic recession. He urged the government to set up a social safety net to enhance the immunity to poverty among farmers. Very few of China’s rural population are covered by pension provision and the majority cannot afford to visit a hospital in the event of illness.

In yet another report that makes grim reading for China’s rulers, the Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences found that 96 percent of respondents now feel resentment towards the rich. The report also found that 70 per cent felt there was “a big gap” between the rich and poor in China today.

“I believe that the wealth gap is a much more serious problem nationwide (than hitherto believed),” said Qiu Liping, a professor of social stratification at Shanghai University. The state-run China Daily quoted a Shanghai magazine editor who complained that her red Porsche had been vandalised three times in two weeks. Her friend’s Lamborghini had fared no better. “I think there are many people in this city who harbour a deep resentment against the rich,” she told the newspaper.

This simmering class hatred presents enormous problems for the Chinese regime and the wealth gap shows no signs of narrowing. The country is currently also in the grip of a property bubble which the authorities are trying to bring under control with new measures to curb bank loans and reduce speculative sales. Sales in the luxury end of the market in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have broken all records in recent months. But yet another CASS report found that 80 percent of urban residents cannot afford to buy homes. For many, the growth of an ostentatious super-rich elite is directly linked to the antics of the ruling party. A now famous report over the wealthiest Chinese – those holding in excess of 100 million yuan ($20.3 million) – found that 91 percent of them were children of ‘communist’ officials.

And corruption is seen as the biggest blot on China’s international image, according to a December poll by the Horizon Research Consultancy Group. 60 percent of its respondents in five major cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chongqing – think corruption among government officials is the most serious issue.

These surveys confirm what socialists, as well as other workers and farmers in China, know from their own experience. Far from spreading Confucian “harmony” between the classes, the pro-rich policies of the Chinese regime are preparing a social and political explosion. This has been delayed to some extent by the maintenance of high growth, although this is now based on unprecedented levels of bank credit and is ultimately unsustainable. This type of economic development, while it excludes the poor, can give the appearance of a way out, or of some improvements in the future. But based on the present economic course, mass unrest is set to increase dramatically as the latest surveys confirm. This in turn could lead to the development of workers’ organisations and a movement towards trade unions – the only force that can offer an alternative.

I’m on tour in the US! Truth be told, I’ve been on tour for a week, appeared on National Public Radio, and West Coast Live (like Prairie Home Companion, but funnier and with fewer banjos), and have cropped up at a the Commonwealth Club, and a bookstore or two in the San Francisco Bay Area. But now I’m on the road, hitting Boston, New York, Washington DC, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles with the book in hand.

The book itself is not an unmitigated disaster. It has kind (and starred) review from Publishers Weekly, was a book of the week in the UK Observer, and garnered kind words from Naomi Klein and Michael Pollan. Do check it out if you can. It’ll be in libraries, independent book stores and, if you must, online (in which case, please do leave a review here). Hell, even GQ liked it.

But if you’re around Boston, New York, Washington DC, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles or San Francisco, and able to make it in person to hear The Value of Nothing: The Stand Up Comedy Routine, here’s where I’ll be in the coming weeks:

**Monday Jan 11th**
BOSTON – Brattle Theatre – 6:00pm
40 Brattle Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA

**Wednesday, January 13th**
NEW YORK – In conversation with Naomi Klein, bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, and Amy Goodman, host of DemocracyNow!
New York Society for Ethical Culture – 7:00pm
2 West 64th Street
New York, NY 10023

**Thursday, January 14th**
WASHINGTON DC – Politics & Prose – 7:00 PM
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008

**Monday, January 18th**
SEATTLE, WA
Town Hall Seattle – 7:30pm
1119 8th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98101

**Tuesday, January 19th**
PORTLAND, OR
Powell’s – 7:30pm
1005 West Burnside Street
Portland, OR 97209

**Wednesday, January 20th**
LOS ANGELES Public Library – 7:00 PM
“ALOUD at Central Library”
630 W. 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071

**Tuesday, January 26th**
SAN FRANCISCO World Affairs Council of Northern California – 6:00pm
312 Sutter Street
Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94108

Ashes To Ashes

‘Carbon credit’ projects are doing more bad than good in India
Chander Suta Dogra , Debarshi Dasgupta

Climate change is the newest, fastest way to make money. For corporate India, as also for much of the industrialised world, global warming is bringing in cash like never before, and throwing up novel opportunities to make more, all in the name of reducing emission of dirty greenhouse gases (GHG). But even as it’s rush hour on the ‘climate’ train to riches, there are serious reservations being expressed about whether the current market-linked mechanism to battle climate change is really reducing GHG. Are the industries of developing countries like ours getting away with short-term profits in the name of climate change while they continue to damage the environment and inflict more permanent damage on the people? Why are carbon trading and Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) fast becoming dirty words in the green activist’s lexicon?

It all began some five years ago when the first project was registered with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the CDM. This was the result of an agreement at Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 (Kyoto Protocol) which was subsequently ratified by several countries. It enables developed countries to achieve emission reduction targets by paying for greenhouse gas emission reduction in developing countries.

First World countries are expected to buy certified emission reduction (CER) aka carbon credits, or earn them by investing in green projects under the CDM process. CERs are a ‘certificate’, like a stock, and are used to trade emission credits. Emission reduction projects can range from growing bio-fuel crops to installing machinery at a chemical plant, from neutralising GHGs to building a hydel generator. India ranks second, after China, in developing CDM projects and generating carbon credits.

The Great Carbon Farce

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Since this affects growth, most buy credits. Here is how carbon trading works.

Clean Development Mechanism
The carbon trade to meet Kyoto Protocol targets is registered and monitored under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. India has 478 registered CDM projects, accounting for 28.3 per cent of the global credits. Each credit, equivalent to a reduction of one metric tonne of CO2, sells from anywhere between Rs 650-1,115. This has potential to generate annual revenue worth several hundred million dollars.

Getting Dirty

Credits generated do not necessarily mean reduction in emissions. Consultants can give positive assessments and national authorities can look the other way.

To get CDM status for an industry, firstly one has to prove to the UNFCCC that it is an ‘additional’ project. This means the company has to show it is financially unviable to take up the green project in the absence of western investment. And that with these financial inputs there would be an additional reduction of emissions. A CDM project should also promote sustainable development.

But in practice, many ‘non-additional’ projects (those by big companies that could have come up anyway without western financial aid and which may not lead to additional reduction of emissions) are managing to get CDM registration. Activists call it a fraud.

How can a project get fraudulent credits? “This is because UNFCCC has neither the mechanism to credibly assess the projects nor the will, it seems,” explains Gopal Krishan, an independent environment researcher. The first step in the chain is the designated national authority (DNA), which in India’s case is the ministry of environment and forests. The DNA certifies whether or not a project qualifies for CDM. But as Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) points out, “The government sees the carbon credits as free gifts to be given to industries, something which will bring more money into the country. It does not bother too much to see if the projects submitted are indeed sustainable.” In 2008, SANDRP applied under the RTI to know how many applications for CDM projects had been rejected by the ministry and on what grounds. “They replied that they don’t keep a record of such rejections! To the best of our information, they have not rejected any,” Thakkar told Outlook.

Meanwhile, sustainable development is nowhere in sight. If anything, it’s only more of ‘sustained’ development for the enterprises that earn windfall profits from carbon credits. It has been found that many firms running or seeking to run these “clean” projects have dubious environmental credentials and bother little, if at all, about the environment. Some of the worst offenders in this category are sponge iron units in Chhattisgarh. They have been hauled up by the Chhattisgarh Environment Conservation Board for polluting with impunity. Some plants hauled up by the CECB include SKS Ispat and Godawari Power & Ispat Limited. Each of these plants registered since 2006 earns thousands of dollars each year under the CDM but does little to protect the local environment.

These plants are guilty of emitting a higher level of suspended particulate matter than allowed, sending out noxious fumes and having improper solid waste disposal. An environmental audit on CDMs by the British House of Commons three years ago said the carbon offset industry was clearly encouraging pollution and global warming by associating with India’s “notoriously dirty” sponge iron industry.

The audit criticised two Indian CDM projects—that of SRF Limited in Rajasthan and Gujarat Flurochemicals Limited—that destroy hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), the powerful greenhouse gases used mainly in refrigeration. The House of Commons cited this as a case of “perverse incentives”, since any country making money out of something as harmful as HFCs is unlikely to ban its use as mandated by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

In another instance, the Allain Duhangan Hydroelectric Project in Himachal Pradesh, registered in 2007 with 4,94,668 carbon credits per annum, has paid colossal fines to the ministry of environment and forests for violating green laws. It has paid over Rs 2 crore for illegal damage to trees, Rs 20 lakh for improper dumping of muck and over Rs 22 lakh for illegally encroaching upon forest land. “It shows how the CDM has become a way to access easy finance for projects that are neither beneficial to the local people nor to the local environment,” says Thakkar. “Of the 12 projects that I screened vigorously, not one reduced emissions.”

The “notoriously dirty” sponge iron industry of India got major flak in a House of Commons audit on the CDM.

Kushal Yadav, climate change programme coordinator for the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, says, “If you get down to the levels of CERs, the number of non-additional (fraudulent) CERs issued would certainly be much higher than 40 per cent.” Barbara Haya of the University of California at Berkeley studied 85 CDM projects in India and China in the last six years and she says: “Over 50 per cent are non-additional.” In plainspeak, more than half are a fraud, a bubble, or in this case, hot air.

At least one western government has even factored in credits from non-existent projects as part of their mitigation plans. “The government of Luxembourg actually claimed last year that it would be buying credits from the Timarpur Okhla Waste Management Ltd in Delhi beginning April 1, 2009. But what’s shocking is that the plant is not even there on the ground. How can you claim that you will be buying credits from a plant that does not even exist?” Yadav asks.

Independent agencies called designated operational entities (DOE), which are registered global consultancy organisations that are supposed to act as validators/verifiers of the projects for the UNFCCC, are meant to be one of the checking mechanisms. But this too has proved a failure because they are commercial entities. Paid for by the project developers, theirs is an obvious case of conflict of interest. A WWF report on the carbon trade had stated that there is growing pressure on does to positively validate project proposals given the intense competition between them. At least one DOE, it added, had ironically signed contracts in which the last payment by the client is due upon the successful registration of the project.

This malaise of greenwashing unsustainable projects and rewarding them with carbon revenue seems to have even hit the UNFCCC’s top echelons. Eva Filzmoser, of the Germany-based CDM Watch, says, “There is growing evidence, as reported by the New York Times, that members of the CDM executive board have been aggressively pushing projects promoted by companies from their home countries irrespective of their merits as sustainable projects.” This has raised demands for a credible code of conduct for board members which factors in conflict of interests and creates transparency in their working. But with so much ‘credit’ at stake, that’s easier said than done.

By Chander Suta Dogra and Debarshi Dasgupta

Jan 08, 2010 By Sonia Shah

Originally published in Yale Environment 360, Sonia Shah writes that in the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and — most recently — bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.

Ever since Olga Owen Huckins shared the spectacle of a yard full of dead, DDT-poisoned birds with her friend Rachel Carson in 1958, scientists have been tracking the dramatic toll on wildlife of a planet awash in pesticides. Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year.

But as regulators grapple with the lethal dangers of pesticides, scientists are discovering that even seemingly benign, low-level exposures to pesticides can affect wild creatures in subtle, unexpected ways — and could even be contributing to a rash of new epidemics pushing species to the brink of extinction.

In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and — most recently — bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.

For decades, toxicologists have accrued a range of evidence showing that low-level pesticide exposure impairs immune function in wildlife, and have correlated this immune damage to outbreaks of disease. Consumption of pesticide-contaminated herring has been found to impair the immune function of captive seals, for example, and may have contributed to an outbreak of distemper that killed over 18,000 harbor seals along the northern European coast in 1988. Exposure to PCBs has been correlated with higher levels of roundworm infection in Arctic seagulls. The popular herbicide atrazine has been shown to make tadpoles more susceptible to parasitic worms.

The recent spate of widespread die-offs began in amphibians. Scientists discovered the culprit — an aquatic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, of a class of fungi called “chytrids” — in 1998. Its devastation, says amphibian expert Kevin Zippel, is “unlike anything we’ve seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs.” Over 1,800 species of amphibians currently face extinction.

It may be, as many experts believe, that the chytrid fungus is a novel pathogen, decimating species that have no armor against it, much as Europe’s smallpox and measles decimated Native Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But “there is a really good plausible story of chemicals affecting the immune system and making animals more susceptible,” as well, says San Francisco State University conservation biologist Carlos Davidson.

In California, for example, insecticides coated on the crops of the San Joaquin Valley are known to waft upwind to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they settle in the air, snow, and surface waters, and inside the tissues of amphibians. And when Davidson compared historical reports of pesticide use, habitat loss, wind patterns, and amphibian population counts in California for the years 1971 to 1991, he found a strong correlation between upwind pesticide use — in particular cholinesterase-inhibiting chemicals such as the insecticide carbaryl — and declining amphibian populations.

Experimental evidence bolsters Davidson’s findings. In lab experiments, exposure to carbaryl dramatically reduced yellow-legged frogs’ production of fungus-fighting compounds called antimicrobial peptides, which may be crucial to amphibians’ ability to fend off chytrid fungus. Further testing has shown that amphibian species that produce the most effective mixes of antimicrobial peptides resist experimental chytrid infection, and tend to be those that survive most successfully in the wild.

Six years after scientists discovered the fungal assault on amphibians, a mysterious plague began decimating honeybees. Foraging honeybees first started vanishing from their hives, abandoning their broods and queens to certain death by starvation, in 2004. Alarmed beekeepers dubbed the devastating malady “colony collapse disorder.” Between 2006 and 2009, colony collapse disorder and other ills destroyed 35 percent of the U.S. honeybee population.

Some experts believe colony collapse disorder is the result of a “perfect storm” of honeybee-debilitating factors: poor nutrition, immune dysfunction from decades of industrial beekeeping practices, and the opportunism of multiple pathogens, acting in malevolent concert. But many beekeepers believe that a new class of chemicals based on nicotine, called neonicotinoids, may be to blame.

Neonicotinoids came into wide use in the early 2000s. Unlike older pesticides that evaporate or disperse shortly after application, neonicotinoids are systemic poisons. Applied to the soil or doused on seeds, neonicotinoid insecticides incorporate themselves into the plant’s tissues, turning the plant itself into a tiny poison factory emitting toxin from its roots, leaves, stems, pollen, and nectar.

In Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia, beekeepers’ concerns about neonicotinoids’ effect on bee colonies have resulted in a series of bans on the chemicals. In the United States, regulators have approved their use, despite the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard method of protecting bees from insecticides — by requiring farmers to refrain from applying them during blooming times when bees are most exposed — does little to protect bees from systemic pesticides.

“The companies believe this stuff is safe,” says U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) entomologist Jeff Pettis. “It is used at lower levels, and is a boon for farmers,” since neonicotinoids don’t require repeated application, nor wide broadcasting into the environment, he explains. Plus, years of research have shown that only very low levels of the chemicals are exuded from the pollen and nectar of treated plants.

But University of Padua entomologist Vincenzo Girolami believes he may have discovered an unexpected mechanism by which neonicotinoids — despite their novel mode of application — do in fact kill bees. In the spring,neonicotinoid-coated seeds are planted using seeding machines, which kick up clouds of insecticide into the air. “The cloud is 20 meters wide, sometimes 50 meters, and the machines go up and down and up and down,” he says. “Bees that cross the fields, making a trip every ten minutes, have a high probability of encountering this cloud. If they make a trip every five minutes, it is certain that they will encounter this cloud.”

And the result could be immediately devastating. In as-yet-unpublished research, Girolami has found concentrations of insecticide in clouds above seeding machines 1,000 times the dose lethal to bees. In the spring, when the seed machines are working, says Girolami, “I think that 90 percent or more of deaths of bees is due to direct pesticide poisoning.”

Girolami has also found lethal levels of neonicotinoids in other, unexpected — and usually untested — places, such as the drops of liquid that treated crops secrete along their leaf margins, which bees and other insects drink. (The scientific community has yet to weigh in on Girolami’s new, still-to-be-published research, but Pettis, who has heard of the work, calls it “a good and plausible explanation.”)

Two years after the honeybees started disappearing, so, too, did bats. The corpses of hibernating bats were first found blanketing caves in the northeastern United States in 2006. The disease that killed them, caused by a cold-loving fungus called Geomyces destructans — and dubbed White-nose Syndrome for the tell-tale white fuzz it leaves on bats’ ears and noses — has since destroyed at least one million bats. University of Florida wildlife ecologist John Hayes calls it “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.”

Like the mysterious Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus infesting amphibians, Geomyces could be a novel pathogen, newly preying upon defenseless bat species. But scientists have also started to investigate whether pesticide exposure might be playing a role.

Bats are especially vulnerable to chemical pollution. They’re small — the little brown bat weighs just 8 grams — and can live for up to three decades. “That’s lots of time to accumulate pesticides and contaminants,” points out Boston University bat researcher and Ph.D. candidate Marianne Moore, who is studying whether environmental contaminants suppress bats’ immune function. “We know they are exposed to and accumulate organochlorines, mercury, arsenic, lead, dioxins,” she says, “but we don’t understand the effects.”

Which, in the end, is the central dilemma facing pesticide-reliant societies. Proving, with statistical certainty, that low-level pesticide exposure makes living things more vulnerable to disease is notoriously difficult. There are too many different pesticides, lurking in too many complex, poorly understood habitats to build definitively damning indictments. The evidence is subtle, suggestive. But with the rapid decimation of amphibians, bees, and bats, it is accumulating, fast.