The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide. Yet it is an almost unavoidable consequence of de-regulatory ‘free trade’ agreements and the billions of dollars in supports and subsidies – many of them hidden – that prop up the global economy.

To raise awareness about this issue, we’ve produced a short film and a fully-referenced factsheet that helps to explain how and why ‘insane trade’ happens:Read our ‘Insane Trade’ Factsheet (PDF)

Some Jaw-Dropping Facts
about Insane Trade

• More than half of the seafood caught in Alaska
is processed in China; much of it is sent right back to American supermarkets – Alaska Journal of Commerce, 2018.

• Mexican calves fed American corn are exported to the United States, where they are butchered for meat, which is then sold in Mexico – The New York Times, 2017.

• African-grown coffee is often packed in India, Canadian prawns are processed in Iceland, and Bolivian nuts are packed in Italy – UK Times, 2007.

1) Say NO to Insane Trade

Eliminating unnecessary trade would immediately reduce pollution
– including CO2 emissions – and slow resource depletion.

– Speak up – Share our Insane Trade factsheet and short film.

– Call for an end to corporate subsidies and tax breaks. For links to other organizations working on these issues, see the Resisting Corporate Power, Globalization, & ‘Free’ Tradecategory on our Links page. Read more about subsidies on our blog.

– Critically question “free trade” dogma. See our Independent Media Sources page for a list of sites that critically cover free trade. Head to our blog to read more about why so few people are informed about trade issues, and what can be done to stop free trade treaties.

– Support steps to internalize the costs of fossil fuels. For links to other organizations working on this issue, see the Environmental Justice, Climate, & Energy category on our Links page.

2) Say YES to Local Economies

Localizing helps small farms and local businesses to thrive,
strengthens community, and supports personal well-being.

– Buy local food and other local products.

– Help build local food systems and local business alliances. For links to other organizations working on these issues, see the Local Economies and Rethinking Economies and Food & Agriculture categories on our Links page.

– Grow the movement by organizing a workshop, study group, or film screeningabout economic localization.

Frequently Asked Questions
about Insane Trade

How is it cheaper to ship food across the world for processing than to process it where it was grown or caught?

Companies often relocate labor-intensive work overseas to minimize costs – Scotland’s minimum wage is about four times that of China, for instance, which explains why Scottish fish is often processed in China.

With global fossil fuel subsidies (direct and indirect) on the order of $5 trillion per year, this energy-intensive way of doing business is often less expensive for large food distributors, though it carries great costs for the environment and for livelihoods in the food’s country of origin. Lax international free trade rules help make this possible as well.

Why else might countries “re-import” their own products?

In many cases, companies export and re-import goods to benefit from tax policy loopholes. For example, China’s value-added tax (VAT) allows businesses to claim tax rebates by exporting their products, while other businesses can then re-import those same products to claim rebates of their own. Fossil fuel subsidies, which reduce transport costs for businesses, help make this a viable strategy.

The results are absurd. For example, in most years since 2005, China has imported more from itself than from the United States – despite being the US’s third-largest export market.

Availability of crops varies seasonally – is this a factor in global trade?

Not really. Even in the height of apple season in the northern USA, apples from New Zealand and Chile flood supermarket shelves – and regardless of origin, many supermarket apples stay in cold storage for up to a year, so the season doesn’t matter.

Distributors source from wherever is least expensive within their established channels. Supermarkets will choose apples from 10,000 miles away if they’re cheaper than apples grown just 10 miles away. Same with other fresh foods.

The main contributors to insane trade are subsidized transport, free trade agreements, import-export tax rebates, and differences in labor costs and environmental and safety regulations – not seasonal availability of fresh produce.

What about differences between regional crop and livestock varieties? Does this explain why countries both import and export identical foods?

In most cases, NO. In the world of big agribusiness and global trade, foods are interchangeable commodities – they’re grown in large quantities, and regional differences are something to be eliminated. For monocultural producers and large- scale marketers, the goal is uniformity.

Sometimes, regional differences in foods do influence global trade – but not in the way you might expect. For example, beef from factory- farmed cows in the USA is usually too fatty to be sold as hamburger meat. So, that beef gets shipped abroad, and leaner grass-fed beef gets imported. Changing animal husbandry practices in the USA would solve this problem (and several others) – but because of subsidies for fossil fuels and transport infrastructures, insane trade is the industry’s most profitable “solution”.

How does global trade affect the climate?

In 2012, commercial ships produced over a million tons of CO2 per day – more than the emissions of the UK, or Canada, or Brazil. That’s roughly 4% of the world’s CO2 emissions – and it’s set to grow to 17% by 2050 if current trade rules continue.

The growing aviation industry will produce another 20% of global emissions by 2050. And that doesn’t account for the infrastructure needed to support long-distance trade – including cement production, which already contributes 8% of the world’s emissions per year.

Remarkably, climate agreements like the Paris Accords do not account for the emissions from international trade: the CO2 emitted by the thousands of oil tankers, container ships and cargo-carrying aircraft that crisscross the globe do not appear in any nation’s CO2 accounting. Why? Because policymakers believe that trade – and the growth of global GDP – is more important than the climate. Insane!

Do people just want to buy food, and other things, from far away?

Watch and Share our Insane Trade film (3.10min)

Read and Share our ‘Insane Trade’ Factsheet (PDF)

Photo by ImipolexG

The post How Insane is Global Trade? Here are the facts appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sean Keller: In Rojava, a region in Syria also known as North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological vitality is taking place. Devastated by civil war, Syria is a place where a cessation of hostilities often seems like the most that can be hoped for. But Rojava has set its sights much higher. What started as a movement for political autonomy in the city of Kobane has blossomed into an attempt to build a radical pluralist democracy on the principles of communal solidarity — with food security, equality for women, and a localized, anti-capitalist economy at its core.

The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (MEM) has been at the heart of Rojava’s democratic revolution since its inception. The Movement grew out of single-issue campaigns against dam construction, climate change, and deforestation, and in 2015 went from being a small collection of local ecological groups to a full-fledged network of “ecology councils” that are active in every canton of Rojava, and in neighboring Turkey as well. Its mission, as one of its most prominent founding members, Ercan Ayboğa, says, is to “strengthen the ecological character of the Kurdish freedom movement [and] the Kurdish women’s movement”.

It’s not an easy process. Neoliberal policies, war, and climate change have made for an impressive roster of challenges. Crop diversity has been undermined due to longstanding subsidies for monocultures. Stocks of native seeds are declining. The region has been hit by trade embargoes from Turkey, Iraq, and the central Syrian government, and villages have been subject to forced displacement and depopulation. Groundwater reserves are diminishing, and climate change is reducing rainfall. Many wells and farms were destroyed by the self-described Islamic State (ISIS), and many farmers have been killed by mines. Much of the region is without electricity. And there has been an influx of refugees from the rest of Syria, fleeing civil war.

As MEM sees it, the solutions to these overlapping problems must be holistic and systemic. Ercan gives an impressive rundown of MEM’s priorities: Decreasing Rojava’s dependence on imports, returning to traditional water-conserving cultivation techniques, advocating for ecological policy-making at the municipal level, promoting local crops and livestock and traditional construction methods, organizing educational activities, working against destructive and exploitative “investment” and infrastructure projects such as dams and mines — in short, “the mobilization of an ecological resistance” towards anything guilty of “commercializing the waters, commodifying the land, controlling nature and people, and promoting the consumption of fossil fuels”.

In 2016, MEM published a declaration of its social and ecological aims, and it is a thing of beauty. “We must defend,” it says, “the democratic nation against the nation-state; the communal economy against capitalism, with its quick-profit-seeking logic and monopolism and large industries; organic agriculture, ecological villages and cities, ecological industry, and alternative energy and technology against the agricultural and energy policies imposed by capitalist modernity.”

Getting children involved in all of this is critical. Schools in Rojava teach ecology as a fundamental principle. In 2016, with the support of Slow Food International and the Rojava Ministry of Water and Agriculture, MEM helped build a series of school gardens in villages around the city of Kobane, in order to provide a ‘laboratory’ for children to learn about the region’s biodiversity and how to care for it. These gardens are growing fruit trees, figs, and pomegranates, instead of corn and wheat monocultures. Some have been planted on land that was once virtually destroyed by ISIS. In Rojava, even cultivation comes inherently infused with a spirit of resistance. “We grew up on this land and we haven’t abandoned it,” says Mustafa, a teacher whose school was one of those to receive a new garden in 2016. “As a people of farmers and livestock breeders, we have always tended the crops using our own techniques, which are thousands of years old.” As the MEM declaration says, “Bringing ecological consciousness and sensibility to the organized social sphere and to educational institutions is as vital as organizing our own assemblies.”

The spirit of resistance is as alive in the realm of society and economics as it is on the land. The cooperative economy in Rojava is booming. Michel Knapp, a longtime activist in the Kurdish freedom movement and co-author of the book Revolution in Rojava, observes that most cooperatives in Rojava are “small, with some five to ten members producing textiles, agricultural products and groceries, but there are some bigger cooperatives too, like a cooperative near Amûde that guarantees most of the subsistence for over 2,000 households and is even able to sell on the market.”

The government of Rojava is democratic and decentralized, with residential communes and local councils giving people autonomy and control over decisions that affect their lives. Municipal-level government bodies are systematically integrated into the operations of MEM, in a one-of-a-kind partnership between the public and nonprofit spheres. And the prison system is being radically reformed, with local ‘peace committees’ paying attention to the social and political dimensions of crime in passing judgment. Most cities contain no more than one or two dozen prisoners, according to Ercan.

And to top it all, women have taken a leading role in every facet of the revolution. Women’s cooperatives are a common sight in Rojava, as are women’s councils, women’s committees, and women’s security forces. Women’s ecovillages have been built both in Rojava and across the border in Turkish Kurdistan, aimed at helping victims of domestic violence and trauma. Patriarchy is just one more aspect of the neoliberal program being cast aside in Rojava, on the road towards building what MEM describes as “a radical democratic, communal, ecological, women-liberated society.”

This piece was originally published on Medium as part of Local Futures’ Planet Local webseries.

Read about other holistic ecological initiatives from around the world on our Planet Local: Ecology page.

Dig deeper into Rojava and the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement on the following pages (the source material for much of this piece):

• ‘The revolution in Rojava: an eyewitness account’. Article published by ROAR Magazine; October 2016. https://roarmag.org/essays/revolution-rojava-pluto-book/
• Final Declaration of the First Conference of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement; April 2016. http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/mesop-ecology-mvmt/
• ‘Kobane: An eco-challenge for humanity’. Article published by Slow Food International; December 2016. https://www.slowfood.com/kobane-an-eco-challenge-for-humanity/
• The official website of MEM (in Turkish): http://www.mezopotamyaekoloji.org/

Lead image: Hasankeyf, a predominantly Kurdish historic town in Turkey, and the proposed site of a large hydroelectric dam which would threaten the local ecosystem and water supply. MEM has been active in opposing the project

The post Agriculture and Autonomy in the Middle East appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Going local puts more focus on what’s really important: friends and family, community, good food, clean environment.

This 2-minute animated video from our friends at Local Futures offers a succinct and accessible intro to localization.

As the narrator explains, localisation fosters community, creates more and better jobs, reduced inequality and cuts pollution. In this way it is the perfect antidote to corporate globalisation.

In the current political climate, we’d like to note that nationalism is not in any way the same as localization, and that corporate globalisation is not in any way the same as global cooperation. As the old sustainability maxim says, think global act local!

The post Going Local: the Solution-Multiplier (A short introduction to economic localization) appeared first on P2P Foundation.