An analysis by the Los Angeles Times finds that costs associated with the February 2014 explosion at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) could total US$2 billion.

The direct cost of the clean-up is now estimated at US$640 million, based on a contract modification made in July with contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.

The cost-plus contract leaves open the possibility of even higher costs as the clean-up continues and, as the LA Times notes, it does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system (which failed after the 2014 explosion) or any future costs of operating the repository longer than originally planned.

The lengthy closure following the explosion could result in waste disposal operations extending for an additional seven years, at an additional cost of US$200 million per year or US$1.4 billion (€1.25b) in total. Thus direct (clean-up) costs and indirect costs could exceed US$2 billion.

And further costs are being incurred storing waste at other nuclear sites pending the re-opening of WIPP. Federal officials hope to resume limited operations at WIPP by the end of this year, but full operations cannot resume until a new ventilation system is completed in about 2021.

As expensive as the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster

The US$2 billion figure is similar to the costs associated with the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster. The clean-up of Three Mile Island was estimated to cost US$1 billion by 1993, or US$1.7 billion adjusted for inflation today.

Yet another cost for the federal government was a US$74 million (€66m) settlement paid to the state of New Mexico in January 2016. The negotiated agreement relates to the 14 February 2014 explosion and a truck fire that took place nine days earlier.

It sets out corrective actions that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL – the source of the waste drum that exploded) and WIPP must take to resolve permit violations. The US$74 million settlement is in lieu of fines imposed on the federal government by the state of New Mexico for the two incidents.

Given that the February 2014 fire and explosion exposed multiple levels of mismanagement and slack regulation, it was no surprise that the immediate response to the incidents was problematic. As discussed previously in The Ecologist, everything that was supposed to happen, didn’t – and everything that wasn’t supposed to happen, did.

And in light of the systemic problems with management and regulation, it is no surprise that clean-up operations over the past 2.5 years have been problematic.

GAO identifies a host of problems

An August 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the federal Department of Energy (DOE) did not meet its initial cost and schedule estimates for restarting nuclear waste disposal operations at WIPP, resulting in a cost increase of about US$64 million (€57m) and a delay of nine months.

Worse still, mismanagement of the clean-up has involved poor safety practices. Last year, the DOE’s Independent Office of Enterprise Assessments released a report that found that WIPP clean-up operations were being rushed to meet the scheduled reopening date and that this pressure was contributing to poor safety practices.

The report states: “The EA analysis considered operational events and reviews conducted during May 2014 through May 2015 and identified a significant negative trend in performance of work. During this period, strong and unrealistic schedule pressures on the workforce contributed to poor safety performance and incidents during that time are indicators of the potential for a future serious safety incident.”

The report points to “serious issues in conduct of operations, job hazard analysis, and safety basis.” Specific problems identified in the report include:

• workers incorrectly changing filters resulting in five safety violations;

• waste oil left underground for an extended period despite a renewed emphasis on combustible load reduction;

• fire water lines inadequately protected against freezing;

• inadequate processes leading a small fire underground, followed by the failure of workers and their supervisor to report the fire;

• an operator improperly leaving a trainee to operate a waste hoist, the hoist being improperly used, tripping a safety relay and shutting down the hoist for hours;

• an engineer violating two safety postings to remove a waste hoist safety guard;

• workers removing a grating to an underground tank and not posting a barricade, causing a fall hazard;

• a backlog of hundreds of preventive maintenance items; and

• failing to properly track overtime such that “personnel may be working past the point of safety”.

The Office of Enterprise Assessments’ report concludes: “The issues discussed above could be leading indicators of a potentially serious incident in the future. Many more issues involving conduct of operations, maintenance, and inadequate controls also raise concerns about the possibility of a serious incident.”

Earlier this year, clean-up work in two underground areas was suspended for one month due to poor air quality. Work was stopped on February 22 after equipment detected elevated levels of carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

Radioactive contamination of the underground remains a problem, albeit the case that the size of the restricted area has been significantly reduced. “The facility was never designed to operate in a contaminated state,” said Don Hancock from the Southwest Research and Information Center.

“It was supposed to open clean and stay clean, but now it will have to operate dirty. Nobody at the Energy Department wants to consider the potential that it isn’t fixable.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory at fault as well

While a number of reports have exposed problems at WIPP, others have exposed serious problems at LANL. An April 2015 report by DOE’s Accident Investigation Board (AIB) concluded that a culture of lax oversight and inadequate safety protocols and training at LANL led to the February 2014 explosion at WIPP.

“If LANL had adequately developed and implemented repackaging and treatment procedures that incorporated suitable hazard controls and included a rigorous review and approval process, the [February 2014] release would have been preventable”, the AIB report states.

“The ineffectiveness and weaknesses in the oversight activities were at all levels,” said Ted Wyka, the DOE safety expert who led the investigation.

The AIB report points to the failure of LANL to effectively review and control waste packaging, train contractors and identify weaknesses in waste handling. The board also found that LANL, contractor EnergySolutions and the National Nuclear Security Administration office at LANL failed to ensure that a strong safety culture existed at the lab.

The AIB found that workers did not feel comfortable raising safety issues and felt pressured to “get it done at all costs.” LANL employees also raised concerns that workers were brought in with little or no experience and rushed through an inadequate training program.

“As a result,” the AIB report states, “there was a failure to adequately resolve employee concerns which could have identified the generation of non compliant waste prior to shipment” to WIPP.

‘Lessons were not learned’

The immediate cause of the 14 February 2014 explosion ‒ mixing nitrate wastes with an organic absorbent (kitty litter) ‒ was recognised as a potential problem in 2012, if not earlier. One worker told the AIB that when concerns were raised over the use of organic kitty litter as an absorbent, the employee was told to “focus on their area of expertise and not to worry about the other areas of the procedure.”

Workers noticed foaming chemicals and orange smoke rising from containers of nuclear waste at LANL, but supervisors told them to “simply wait out the reaction and return to work once the foaming ceased and the smoke subsided,” the AIB report states. “Lessons were not learned.”

No doubt some lessons have been learned as a result of the underground explosion at WIPP. But Greg Mello from the Los Alamos Study Group points to a problem that is likely to recur. LANL receives bonuses from the DOE for meeting goals such as removing nuclear waste by a certain deadline.

That deadline pressure was very much in evidence at LANL in the lead-up to the WIPP accident and it will likely weaken safety practices in future. “You can’t just say everyone has to try harder,” Mello said. “Mixing profit, deadlines and dangerous radioactive waste is incompatible.”

A February 2016 report from the DOE’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) was equally scathing of LANL. “Overall, we found LANL’s corrective action program did not always adequately address issues, did not effectively prevent their recurrence, and did not consistently identify systemic problems,” the report said.

Systemic problems

LANL managers said they agreed with the OIG findings and were working to resolve problems. “The Laboratory is working closely with National Nuclear Safety Administration to address the findings of the audit report”, LANL said in a statement.

But the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) – a semi-autonomous agency within the DOE – is itself a big part of the problem of systemic mismanagement of nuclear sites. A June 2015 Government Accountability Office report strongly criticised NNSA oversight of contractors who manage the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities.

The report points to a litany of ongoing failures to properly oversee private contractors at eight nuclear sites, including those managing LANL. The report found that the NNSA lacked enough qualified staff members to oversee contractors, and it lacked guidelines for evaluating its contractors.

Greg Mello from the Los Alamos Study Group was blunt in his criticism of the NNSA: “An agency that is more than 90 percent privatized, with barely enough federal employees to sign the checks and answer the phones, is never going to be able to properly oversee billion-dollar nuclear facilities of vast complexity and danger.”

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the newsletter, where a version of this article was originally published.

Nuclear Monitor, published 20 times a year, has been publishing deeply researched, often critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

Forget reality shows. For anyone interested in the future of food – and really the future of the entire planet – the corporate theatre of the mega-merger is proving to be compelling stuff.

This week Monsanto confirmed a record-breaking $66bn takeover of its GM seeds business by rival Bayer. The deal – if it is allowed to go ahead – would create the world’s biggest seed and pesticide company.

Shareholders and lobbyists are rubbing their hands at the potential for profit and power, and campaigners are directing the expected ire at the deal, vowing to mobilise their resources to fight it – though it is unclear just what that fight will look like and how much influence, if any, it will have.

More likely it will be the sheer size of the merger – creating a company that will control 30% of the global seed market – that will slow regulatory approval of the merger and may eventually topple the deal.

Should we be worried?

Of course we should be concerned, but not just by this proposed merger. To understand why we need to look at the wider landscape of corporate agriculture. At the moment six companies (sometimes called the ‘Big 6’) control the global marketplace for pesticides and crop biotechnology.

These companies are BASF, Bayer, DuPont, Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The Bayer-Monsanto merger is just one of three proposed mergers with the potential to change the face of agriculture.

Dow Chemical and DuPont last December announced a $130bn merger, while earlier this year Syngenta agreed to a $43 billion sale to China National Chemical Corp (Monsanto has also tried and failed several times to merge with Syngenta).

Should any or all of the deals currently on the table be approved by international regulators it would essentially turn the Big 6 to the Huge 3.

Approval is not guaranteed in any of these cases and as these international corporations jockey for position, there may be more lobbying, persuasion and downright bullying going on behind the scenes than many of us can easily comprehend.

But mega-mergers don’t just happen because two companies want them to. Announcement of a merger is only the first of many steps. In particular, to create a super company the deal will likely have to pass through several hoops including:

• The shareholders in both companies must approve the deal
• It must pass Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) antitrust approval in the US
• CFIUS (Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States) must give its approval
• Foreign antitrust approval (in Germany and throughout the European Union and in other countries) MUST also be granted

Delays for Dow-DuPont

Certainly all is not going smoothly for the proposed Dow-DuPont merger.

Shareholders in both companies were quick to approve the deal, but earlier this month the EU antitrust regulator at the European Commission announced that it had suspended its deadline for a review into the proposed merger because the companies hadn’t submitted the relevant information required.

Shortly before that the European Commission opened an in-depth probe into the merger over concerns that, if allowed, it would reduce competition in crop protection, seeds and certain petrochemicals.

Depending on the outcome of the probe, and once the companies submit the requested information, the Commission will then restart the clock on its merger review, which could wrap up by the end of the year.

In the US the process for the Dow-DuPont merger is also under scrutiny. The American Antitrust Institute, Food & Water Watch and the National Farmers Union have recently written a letter to antitrust regulators arguing that, with just six big firms controlling the global agricultural biotech market, the industry is already ‘consolidated’ and further consolidation would greatly diminish the ability of smaller biotech companies to compete.

They suggested that it would also lead to rising prices and fewer choices for farmers and consumers alike. The letter particularly noted that, should the merger go ahead, it would create a duopoly with just two companies, Dow-DuPont and Monsanto, controlling 76% of the maize and 66% of the soya markets.

How should we respond?

Regulators don’t simply judge each case on its merits – or lack thereof. They have to take into consideration what the corporate landscape looks like as well. Each new approved merger creates an obstacle for the next one; and should Dow-DuPont be given the go-ahead first, regulators may have no option but to veto the Bayer-Monsanto merger.

In this respect, campaigners at the American Antitrust Institute, Food & Water Watch and the National Farmers Union have got it right. The biggest pressure point is with the regulators. Strong regulation is – or should be – there to protect all of us. Regulators must be made to see that these proposed mergers are bad for business, bad for farming and ultimately bad for the consumer. They should be pressed into doing their jobs regardless of the powerful lobbying influence of large ag-biotech-chemical firms.

It’s a risky strategy, however, because getting – and keeping – the public interested in the machinations of big business is hard work (as the campaigns against TTIP TTP and CETA have shown).

This is why so many campaign groups have taken up ‘Monsanto-bashing’ as a way of stirring up public anger and hoping that this will be enough to get more ‘people’ involved.

Without public support many campaigns find they cannot get funding and without funding little effective work gets done and campaigners, instead, find themselves sucked into a world of angry tweets and Facebook posts that basically go nowhere and do nothing except confirm the fury of the same handful of people over and over again.

Putting Monsanto in perspective

‘Monsanto bashing’ is easy. Monsanto, through its own actions, has turned itself into the posterchild of the evil corporation.

As revealed by journalists and whistle blowers over the years, the company’s single-minded, near psychopathic pursuit of profit and growth have demonstrated that no tactic is too outrageous, no amount of money too large to spend, indeed nothing is off the table, when it comes to strengthening its own position and ensuring that its agenda prevails.

That agenda in a nutshell is to promote an industrial agriculture model that we know is faulty and failing. It is a model that is responsible for around a third of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions. It is largely responsible for the depletion of global soil and water resources, and biodiversity loss and, particularly in developing nations, the displacement of millions of small and family farmers.

There is a strong case to argue that it is also responsible for significant nutritional deficits in the global population. Its focus on seed patents benefits only a few while most certainly threatening food sovereignty on a global scale.

Large corporations like Monsanto are very good at generating profits and wealth for a select group of shareholders, but they also cause enormous and often hidden and unreported harm. Documents over the years have revealed that Monsanto has knowingly and unapologetically produced and sold products that were toxic to humans, wildlife and the environment.

PCBs and dioxins are older examples of this. But products like glyphosate and patented GMO seeds – which eventually produce GMO food crops – are more recent concerns. Often it has taken legal challenge, based on evidence of extreme harm, before the company would withdraw these products.

Most people know this but, how much do they know about the other members of the Big 6?

Bayer’s dark history

Bayer is the company that brought us aspirin – and heroin. Having trademarked heroin, it then spent decades marketing it as a cough medicine for children with the reassuring message that it was “without side-effects“.

During the Second World War Bayer produced chemical weapons such as chlorine gas. As part of a large conglomeration IG Farben, it was one of the largest contributors to the Nazi party. It collaborated with the Nazis in scientific experiments and used tens of thousands of death camp inmates as slave labour for its factories.

BASF

BASF is another German company and like Bayer was part of IG Farben. It is responsible for introducing coal tar dyes onto the marketplace as well as synthetic fertilisers, ammonia and in 2005, when campaigning focus was increasing on Monsanto, it was the third biggest seller of pesticides in the world.

Today it has a diverse portfolio of chemicals, plastics, performance products, oil and gas as well as agro- chemicals and GM crops.

Dow

Dow is the largest chemical company in the US and has, over the years, brought us napalm, Styrofoam and dioxins. It was responsible – via its subsidiary Union Carbide – for the Bhopal tragedy in India in 1984, when thousands suffocated from 27 tons of methyl isocyanate that leaked out of Union Carbide’s pesticides plant.

It has never accepted responsibility for the disaster.

DuPont

DuPont began life making gunpowder and explosives in the US. It’s given us cellophane, nylon, Lycra and Lucite. It also invented Teflon (the toxic perfluorinated chemicals from which now pollute every corner of the globe), CFCs (responsible for the near destruction of the ozone layer), and the plastic bottles that pollute our oceans.

DuPont also put the brain-destroying lead in our petrol as well as designing, building and operating the world’s first plutonium production plant.

Syngenta

Syngenta is a relatively new kid on the block, formed in 2000 by the merger of Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals. It is the producer of the highly toxic insecticide paraquat – and the disgraceful (and now banned) ‘terminator’ technology, which produces crops that generate sterile seed, forcing farmers to purchase new seeds from biotech seed companies each year.

However, the most urgent threat posed by Syngenta are the ways in which it uses modern marketing techniques to thrust the biotech agenda on the world. The best example of this is the way the company has ‘collaborated’ in a project to give away a vitamin A enhanced rice (‘Golden Rice’) to farmers in the Global South.

Michael Pragnell chief executive of Syngenta is quoted by Corporate Watch as having described the tactic as a “latch-lifter”:

” … the regulators either have to become less fastidious or deny benefits to patients. We are pursuing these markets not because we will make a fortune, but because it will introduce some regulatory tension.”

Golden rice is now widely acknowledged to be a failure as a crop and in any case never really addressed the underlying causes of vitamin A deficiency such as poverty and lack of access to a diverse diet. However it is clear that the development of the next generation of GM crops, which can be marketed as having consumer benefits, is a tough and increasingly urgent challenge for campaigners.

Power dynamics need to change!

Each of these companies could be viewed as ‘evil’ in some way, and deserving of a good ‘bashing’, but it is their collective effect on the agricultural market that has been the most devastating.

Perhaps more important than their perceived evil, however, is the power which they have been allowed to acquire and how it is used in service of corporate goals – such as not paying their fair share of taxes and exerting extreme influence on political and regulatory processes – rather than public benefits.

Although not directly related to the biotech mergers, a timely analysis by the anti-poverty charity Global Justice Now has revealedthat 69 out of the world’s top 100 economic entities are corporations.

The report notes that the world’s ten biggest corporations – including Walmart, Apple and Shell – make more money than most countries in the world combined. Looking at the top 200 entities it found that many smaller countries were being squeezed out, leaving 153 corporations ranking above many nations from Africa, Asia and South America.

This kind of power – which our governments are complicit in – must be challenged. Until we change the ‘corporation-is-king’ mind-set of our culture, until we stop treating corporations like people, nothing will change.

That change will come, in part, when we start electing officials who want to solve the problem instead of those who simply want to benefit from and be a part of it.

The road not taken

Media response to the proposed mergers has been interesting. An online piece from the normally ultraconservative Bloomberg news channel spends more time evaluating the dodgy pasts of Bayer, and Monsanto – and the damage done to public trust – than it does the financial potential of the deal.

More interestingly, a sober and thoughtful article in the Wall St Journal suggests that news of the merger might give us pause to reconsider the path we are on, agriculturally speaking. The piece argues that the GMO crop boom could be over, that in the face of superweeds, higher seed prices and dropping yields farmers are turning away from GM crops.

But there are also other paths, which we have followed for far too long, which need reconsidering.

Large corporations like the Big 6 are driven by the need to grow, to constantly increase shareholder value. If they can’t find new products and new markets they have to merge – either forced or voluntarily – or they create de facto monopolies by providing services to governments.

More than half a century ago US President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military / industrial complex highlighted the early examples of this. The so called ‘new alliance‘ of global corporations, governments and corporate charities focused on imposing high-tech, patent-driven, agrochemical- and biotech-managed agriculture on Africa is the latest example.

And so are these proposed mergers.

Giant corporations lack transparency, hide from regulatory oversight, corrupt trading relationships, government and democracy. It is not just that they are ‘too big to fail’; they are too big for an equitable, civilised society – and, when they operate in an area as essential to life as food production, they are life threatening.

The Big Ag mergers on the table right now are worlds away from ‘sweet commerce’ – the civilising influence of capitalism that has been propagandised by economists, banks and businesses since the 17th century.

You have to wonder, how much longer we are going to hang on to this tattered myth before we begin to make other, better, plans.

Pat Thomas is the founder / director of Beyond GM . She is an author, journalist and campaigner and a former editor of The Ecologist.

This article was originally published on Beyond GM.

The impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, coup or not, represents a fundamental realigning of modern Brazil.

For some in the country, the crisis is an opportunity. These politicians and businessmen are now exploiting the upheaval to roll-back environmental laws and get their hands on the vast natural resources found in protected regions of the Amazon.

The new government led by Michel Temer faces a budget deficit of 10%, an unemployment rate of 10.9% and strong calls for austerity. It looks set to terminate a number of successful social policies, and proposes to weaken worker rights by redefining slavery to exclude “degrading conditions” and “exhausting shifts”.

Nonetheless, Temer will want to maintain Brazil’s international brand of a nation committed to the environment. After all, climate change was put centre stage at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics and a clear message was beamed into billions of homes across the planet: Brazil is green.

Yet these environmental credentials are questionable. Under president Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor, Lula, deforestation returned, large-scale mining and agriculture was expanded, and more dams were built.

Temer has appointed a number of environmentalist politicians to prominent positions such as the Green Party’s José Sarney Filho, now environment minister, and José Serra, the foreign minister. But economic rejuvenation at all costs will inevitably overshadow policies aimed at conservation.

Weakening environmental assessment

Earlier this year, Temer published a document titled ‘A bridge to the future‘, which outlined his plans for the future of Brazil and its economy. The environment, the Amazon and climate change were not mentioned.

In particular, campaigners fear the new, pro-business government will fast-track dams, mines and other damaging schemes by weakening environmental impact assessments. A proposed bill, if passed, would allow for infrastructure projects to continue regardless of potential impacts on the environment and indigenous lands.

This opens the door for accelerated environmental damage in the name of economic recovery and growth.

Though activists cheered the recent cancellation of a $10 billion hydroelectric dam on environmental grounds, it seems such celebrations may prove to be premature.

A key figure behind this bill is senator Blairo Maggi, Brazil’s soybean king and a former recipient of Greenpeace’s Golden Chainsaw awarded to the “person who most contributed to Amazon destruction”. Temer has recently appointed him Minister of Agriculture.

Maggi is a prominent member of the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (or ruralistas) that have long argued for land reform so that protected forests can be chopped down for crops, cattle and mining, with the products sold abroad. As of 2014, 28.4% of protected areas in the Amazon were of interest to mining companies.

These lands – protected by concerns for both the environment and indigenous communities – will likely witness further encroachment under Temer’s government.

Rewriting the rulebook at fast-track development

In recent months, this increasingly strong lobby has submitted a list of demands to President Temer, including land reform and increased subsidies for agriculture. Over lunch with the ruralistas, Temer seemingly committed to exploring these demands.

In one of her last acts as president, the Guardian reports, Rousseff supported indigenous land claims and acknowledged a number of quilombolos (lands occupied by the descendants of runaway slaves). Under Temer, policies like these are now under review.

The ruralistas also want to transfer responsibility for land demarcation from the executive to the legislature, where they dominate. The bill proposing this change was first drawn up in 2000 and is now back on the agenda after years in the doldrums. If passed, it would likely sound a death knell for future territory protection.

These ‘land reform’ schemes largely focus on the Amazon rainforest, where deforestation will likely continue thanks to lucrative opportunities in agriculture and mining. Tighter government budgets will also mean less money for those charged with keeping illegal loggers and miners out of protected areas. In a nation where 50 environmental defenders were murdered in 2015 – the most in the world – resistance will likely result in violence.

A silver lining can be found in Brazil taking steps towards ratifying the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Yet, with the Brazilian economy in its worst slump for decades, a bitter medicine remains likely.

Senator Roberto Requião, who voted against impeachment proceedings, urged the new government to “Get yourselves into the trenches … conflict will be inevitable.”

The danger, as it so often is in times of recession, is that the environment will be the new Brazil’s battlefield, and its forgotten first victim.

Ed Atkins is PhD Candidate in Environment, Energy & Resilience, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

“Slow onset emergency” is one of the most terrifying phrases you can hear in the Oxfam offices. Tsunamis and earthquakes scare us all, but the threat of a gradual, developing crisis like that posed by the El Niño weather system raises a different fear – that we will see suffering in slow motion.

It’s hard to raise the alarm that millions of people face drought and hunger when the crisis builds cumulatively. Yet failed harvests that push families into poverty, communities forced to leave home, and conflict over limited resources all combine to spell disaster on a massive scale. It seems that as humans we find it all too easy to sleepwalk into a catastrophe until it is upon us.

I am feeling the same now as I see the annual Oxfam reports on inequality stacked up on my desk. Three years ago we warned that the world’s richest 85 people had the same wealth as the poorest half of the planet combined. The next year, it was found that the world’s top 1% own more wealth than everyone else combined. And now, in 2016, the number of billionaires who share the wealth of the poorest half of the world is just 62.

Such growing extreme inequality is a warning sign that spells disaster for millions, as surely as any weather forecast. In rich and poor countries alike, it is holding back the global fight against poverty.

Though the world has made great strides in increasing 
people’s incomes over the last 15 years or so, The World Bank calculates that an extra 200 million people could have been brought out of poverty had we also tackled inequality. We have always known that some people are poor while others are rich. What we increasingly understand is that some people are poor because others are rich.

Extreme inequality threatens the very notion that we are “One Humanity”. More unequal societies have been shown to have lower levels of social trust and lead to poorer health. Inequality breeds violence and thwarts gender equality and the rights of women. Extreme inequality does not just mean that someone has a yacht while someone else does not. It means that the world’s poorest people are condemned to live shorter, harder and unhappier lives and to have quite different experiences of being human.

It also threatens the idea of “One Earth”. While we all share this planet, what we take from it differs wildly. The poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 billion people – are responsible for just 10% of carbon emissions. In contrast, the world’s richest 10% produce around half. It would take the average person in sub-Saharan Africa 180 years to register the same emissions as the average American in one single year.

Our response to these slow onset crises – of both inequality and climate change – must be to reawaken some values that have been sadly all too dormant in the last 30 years of human history: values overshadowed by the perceived virtues of individualism, competition and even the notion that “greed is good”, which have dominated recent political and economic thinking.

Our economic model has been distorted to benefit a privileged minority. In this “economy of the 1%”, wealth is sucked up rather than trickling down. We strive for ever greater growth that leaves the poorest behind, and cheer for rising GDP, but we ignore the unmeasured price we pay as we burn and chop and extract beyond our planetary boundaries. We fail to even mention the hours of unpaid work, mostly done by women, that keep us all alive and healthy. We allow an elite group to use their extreme wealth to influence governments and policies that perpetuate and increase their dominance, at the expense of the rest.

But we are not helpless. We made this economy and we can unmake it. Instead we can strive for a more human economy, one based on values of collective action to solve problems, and of responsibility to each other and to future generations.

Businesses should thrive in this human economy. But we need to shift to new models that show as much concern for workers, customers and the communities that support them as for shareholders and executive boards. That includes ensuring decent jobs for fair wages and contributing their fair share of tax everywhere that they operate.

And while this is about rediscovering lost values, it is not about going backwards. Too often new technology is feared because it will mean job losses for workers and the further accrual of wealth to those who own the machines. But technology must be a major part of a human economy. It is a great liberator and problem solver, if access can be shared.

Ultimately, a human economy recognises that economic calculations are only a part of the picture. An economy is just one way to describe how we want to live together, and values-based politics and good governance need to play a greater part.

Governments that shy away from actively regulating and directing the economy to reduce inequality and deliver sustainable, equitable growth are not being neutral: they are allowing a small group of the very rich and powerful to take control. Accountable, democratic government is the most powerful equalising force that humanity has ever invented. Nurturing, creative government is a force for cooperation and innovation. A human economy has an active government at its heart.

For a thousand years, from the Peasants’ Revolt, from the Diggers to the Chartists, from Thomas Paine to William Blake, Britain’s history is one that has championed values of fairness, challenged extreme wealth, and set out the right to a more economically equal world.

In the words of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, “Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?”

To meet the challenges of the future, let us remember these lessons from the past.

 
Mark Goldring is a participant at the Resurgence 50th anniversary event One Earth, One Humanity, One Future taking place at Worcester College, Oxford, from 22nd – 25th September 2016.

Mark Goldring is chief executive of Oxfam GB.

The Earth’s last intact wilderness areas are shrinking dramatically.

In a recently published paper we showed that the world has lost 3.3 million square kilometres of wilderness (around 10% of the total wilderness area) since 1993.

Hardest hit were South America, which has experienced a 30% wilderness loss, and Africa, which has lost 14%.

These areas are the final strongholds for endangered biodiversity. They are also essential for sustaining complex ecosystem processes at a regional and planetary scale.

Finally, wilderness areas are home to, and provide livelihoods for, indigenous peoples, including many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalised communities.

But there’s another important service that many wilderness areas provide: they store vast amounts of carbon. If we’re to meet our international climate commitments, it is essential that we preserve these vital areas.

Climate consequences

Large, intact ecosystems store more terrestrial carbon than disturbed and degraded ones. They are also far more resilient to disturbances such as rapid climate change and fire.

For instance, the boreal forest remains the largest ecosystem undisturbed by humans. It stores roughly a third of the world’s terrestrial carbon.

Yet this globally significant wilderness area is increasingly threatened by forestry, oil and gas exploration, human-lit fires and climate change. These collectively threaten a biome-wide depletion of its carbon stocks, considerably worsening global warming.

Our research shows that more than 320,000 sq.km of boreal forest has been lost in the past two decades.

Video: James Watson and James Allan explain their recent research.

Similarly, in Borneo and Sumatra in 1997, human-lit fires razed recently logged forests that housed large carbon stores. This released billions of tonnes of carbon, which some estimate was equivalent to 40% of annual global emissions from fossil fuels.

We found that more than 30% of tropical forest wilderness was lost since the early 1990s, with only 270,000 sq.km left on the planet.

How do we stop the destruction?

All nations need to step up and mobilise conservation investments that can help protect vanishing wilderness areas. These efforts will vary based on the specific circumstances of different nations.

But there is a clear priority everywhere to focus on halting current threats – including road expansion, destructive mining, unsustainable forestry and large-scale agriculture – and enforcing existing legal frameworks.

For example, most of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests are under an onslaught of development pressures. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is being opened up by over 50,000km of planned ‘development corridors’ that criss-cross the continent. These will slice deep into remaining wild places.

In the Amazon, plans are being made to construct more than 300 large hydroelectric dams across the basin. Each dam will require networks of new roads for dam and powerline construction and maintenance.

In northern Australia, schemes are afoot to transform the largest savannah on Earth into a food bowl, jeopardising its extensive carbon stores and biodiversity.

We need to enforce existing regulatory frameworks aimed at protecting imperilled species and ecosystems. We also need to develop new conservation policies that provide land stewards with incentives to protect intact ecosystems. These must be implemented at a large scale.

Wilderness needs immediate protection

For example, conservation interventions in and around imperilled wilderness landscapes should include creating large protected areas, establishing mega-corridors between those protected areas, and enabling indigenous communities to establish community conservation reserves.

In Sabah, Borneo, scientists from the UK’s Royal Society have been working with local government to establish networks of interlinked reserves stretching from the coast to the interior mountains. This provides a haven for wildlife that migrate seasonally to find new food sources.

Funding could also be used to establish ecosystem projects that recognise the direct and indirect economic values that intact landscapes supply. These include providing a secure source of fresh water, reducing disaster risks and storing vast quantities of carbon.

For example, in Ecuador and Costa Rica, cloud forests are being protected to provide cities below with a year-round source of clean water. In Madagascar, carbon funding is saving one of the most biodiversity-rich tropical forests on the planet, the Makira forest.

We argue for immediate, proactive action to protect the world’s remaining wilderness areas, because the alarming loss of these lands results in significant and irreversible harm for nature and humans.

Protecting the world’s last wild places is a cost-effective conservation investment and the only way to ensure that some semblance of intact nature survives for the benefit of future generations.

James Watson is Associate professor, The University of Queensland.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

Brendan Mackey is Director of the Griffith Climate Change Response Program, Griffith University.

James Allan is PhD candidate, School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Queensland.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

News broke this week that Monsanto accepted a $66 billion takeover bid from Bayer.

The new company would control more than 25% of the global supply of commercial seeds and pesticides.

Bayer’s crop chemicals business is the world’s second largest after Syngenta, and Monsanto is the leading commercial seeds business.

Monsanto held a 26% market share of all seeds sold in 2011. Bayer (mainly a pharmaceuticals company) sells 17% of the world’s total agrochemicals and also has a comparatively small seeds sector. If competition authorities pass the deal, the combined company would be the globe’s largest seller of both seeds and agrochemicals.

The deal marks a trend towards consolidation in the industry with Dow and DuPont having agreed to merge and Swiss seed / pesticide giant Syngenta merging with ChemChina, a Chinese government concern.

The mergers would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector, down from six – Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Monsanto and DuPont. Prior to the mergers, these six firms controlled 60% of commercial seed and more than 75% of agrochemical markets.

Alarm bells are ringing with the European Commission putting its approval of the Dow-DuPont deal temporarily on hold, and the US Senate Judiciary Committee is about to hold hearings on the deal due to concerns about consolidation in the industry, which has resulted in increased seed and pesticide prices.

Farmers face more price-gouging on seeds, pesticides

In response to the Monsanto-Bayer merger, US National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson issued the following statement:

“Consolidation of this magnitude cannot be the standard for agriculture, nor should we allow it to determine the landscape for our future. The merger between Bayer and Monsanto marks the fifth major deal in agriculture in the last year …

“For the last several days, our family farm and ranch members have been on Capitol Hill asking Members of Congress to conduct hearings to review the staggering amount of pending merger deals in agriculture today. We will continue to express concern that these megadeals are being made to benefit the corporate boardrooms at the expense of family farmers, ranchers, consumers and rural economies.

“We are pleased that next week the Senate Judiciary Committee will be reviewing the alarming trend of consolidation in agriculture that has led to less competition, stifled innovation, higher prices and job loss in rural America … all mergers, including this recent Bayer / Monsanto deal, [should] be put under the magnifying glass of the committee and the U.S. Department of Justice.”

For all the rhetoric that we often hear about ‘the market’ and large corporations offering choice to farmers and consumers, the evidence shows restriction of choice and the squeezing out of competitors. Over the years, for instance, Monsanto has bought up dozens of competitors to become the largest supplier of genetically engineered seeds with seed prices having risen dramatically.

Consolidation and monopoly in any sector should be of concern to everyone. But the fact that the large agribusiness conglomerates specialise in a globalised, industrial-scale, chemical-intensive model of farming that is adversely affecting what we eat should have us very concerned. Do we want this system to be intensified even further just because their business models depend on it?

The monopolists who really benefit from farm subsidies

Farmers are increasingly reliant on patented corporate seeds, whether non-GM hybrid seeds or GM, and the chemical inputs designed to be used with them. Monsanto seed traits are now in 80% of corn and more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US.

It comes as little surprise then that people in the US now consume a largely corn-based diet: a less diverse diet than in the past, which is high in calorific value, but low in health-promoting, nutrient dense food. This health-damaging ‘American obesity diet’ and the agricultural practices underpinning is now a global phenomenon.

By its very nature, the capitalist economic model that corporate agriculture is attached to demands expansion, market capture and profit growth. And, it must be accepted that it does bring certain benefits to those farmers who have remained in agriculture (if not for the 330 farmers who leave their land every week, according to data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service).

But in the US, ‘success’ in agriculture depends on over $51 billion of taxpayer handouts to over a 10-year period to keep the gravy train on track for a particular system of agriculture designed to maintain corporate agribusiness profit margins. And such ‘success’ fails to factor in all of the external social, health and environmental costs that mean this type of model is ultimately unsustainable. It is easy to spin failure as success when the parameters are narrowly defined.

Moreover, the exporting of the Green Revolution paradigm throughout the globe has been a boon to transnational seed and agrochemical manufacturers, which have benefited from undermining a healthy, sustainable indigenous agriculture and transforming it into a profitable enterprise for global capital.

And not just profitable for global capital – but its company managers too. For example, a few months ago, according to Reuters, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant could receive more than $70 million if Monsanto were to be taken over by Bayer. At the time, Monsanto said it was open to engaging in further negotiations with Bayer after turning down its $62 billion bid.

The report shows how Grant’s exposure to shares and options meant he had an incentive to hold out for the highest possible sale price, which would not only be in the interests of shareholders but also increase the value of his holdings. Other senior figures within Monsanto would also walk away with massive financial gains.

The sharpening concentration of wealth and power

These corporate managers belong to a global agribusiness sector whose major companies rank among the Fortune 500 corporations. These companies are high-rollers in a geo-politicised, globalised system of food production whereby huge company profits are directly linked to the worldwide eradication of the small farm – the bedrock of global food production. Small scale farmers increasingly live a knife-edge existence in which the burden of debt has become a fact of daily life.

But it’s not just small farmers but consumers, taxpayers and the environment are left to pick up the costs of bad food and poor health, inequitable, rigged trade, environmental devastation, mono-cropping and diminished food and diet diversity, the destruction of rural communities, ecocide, degraded soil, water scarcity and drought, and destructive and inappropriate models of development.

A handful of powerful and politically connected corporations are determining what is grown, how it is to be grown, what needs to be done to grow it, who grows it and what ends up on the plate. And despite PR platitudes about the GMO / chemical-intensive model just being part of a wider mix of farming practices designed to feed humanity, from India to Africa indigenous models of agriculture are being squeezed out (through false argument and deception) as corporate imperialism puts pay to notions of food sovereignty.

We should be highly concerned about a food system increasingly dominated by companies that have a history (see this on Monsanto and this on Bayer) of releasing health-damaging, environmentally polluting products onto the market and engaging in bribery, cover-ups, monopolistic practices and what should be considered as crimes against humanity.

Despite the likes of Hugh Grant saying the Monsanto-Bayer merger will be good for farmers and ‘broader society’, most of all it will be good for shareholders and taxpayer-subsidised, state-assisted company profit. That’s the type of hegemonic rhetoric that’s been used down the ages to disguise the true nature of power and its beneficiaries.

It’s not so much the Monsanto-Bayer deal is a move in the wrong direction (which it is), but increasing consolidation is to be expected given the trend in many key sectors toward monopoly capitalism or just plain cartelism, whichever way you choose to look at it. It’s the system of industrialised, capital-intensive agriculture wedded to powerful players whose interests lie in perpetuating and extending their neoliberal economic model that is the real problem.

“We have justified the demise of family farms, decay of rural communities, pollution of the rural environment, and degradation of soil health as being necessary … The problems we are facing today are the consequence of too many people … pursuing their narrow self-interests without considering the consequence of their actions on the rest of society and the future of humanity.” Professor John Ikerd, ‘Healthy Soils, Healthy People‘

So what is the solution? We could begin with agroecology!

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. More of his articles can be found on Colin’s website.

Support Colin’s work here.