Last week, IATP, in partnership with Sustainable Northwest and the National Rural Assembly, hosted the kick-off meeting in Minneapolis for a new initiative: the Rural Climate Network, designed to support rural action and education around climate change. This inaugural meeting brought together rural organizations and leaders from around the country to discuss what resources, tools and information are most needed to help rural citizens understand and respond to the mounting climate crises. The meeting made clear the need for a specifically rural effort that builds connections and capacity among existing organizations, supports and promotes on-the-ground climate projects and supports rural leaders who can speak to both rural communities and policy makers about the need and value of effective climate policy and action on the community, state, national and international levels.

The meeting took place at the McKnight Foundation and included representatives from the following organizations: California Climate and Agriculture Network; Center for Rural Affairs; Center for Rural Strategies; CROPP Cooperative and Organic Valley; CURE; Farm Aid; Forest Guild; Land Stewardship Project; Lutheran Coalition for Public Policy; MACED; Main Street Project; National Congress of American Indians; National Family Farm Coalition; NCAT; Pesticide Action Network; RAFI-USA; Sustainable Northwest;  The Watershed Research and Training Center; Threlkeld Farm Organic Dairy / Organic Valley; and the Western Organization of Resource Councils.

Just when you thought Congress couldn’t screw up the Farm Bill any worse, they surprise us all. As part of a fiscal cliff, New Year’s Day bender, Congress and the White House extended a barebones version of the Farm Bill for yet another nine months—giving the bumbling legislative body more time to further decimate the nation’s main farm and food policy.

The Farm Bill extension, apparently written largely by powerful Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and VP Joe Biden, continues existing commodity programs (including controversial direct payments), keeps the food stamp program largely intact, and provides a temporary extension of the dairy program. But there’s a long list of what it doesn’t do, including funding extension for 37 programs. It also doesn’t include immediate emergency relief to livestock producers and fruit growers still dealing with the damaging effects of the ongoing drought. The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), a critical program supporting agroecology, can’t sign up new farmers to participate in 2013. Other programs that received no mandatory funding include a host of renewable energy programs, the Beginning Farmer and Rancher program, rural development programs and organic and specialty crop research programs.  Additionally, an important pilot program for local and regional procurement of international food aid was not funded. (See excellent summaries of the deal by the National Farmers Union and the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture).

Aside from the program bloodletting, perhaps most jarring was the complete disdain Congressional leadership had for the Farm Bill itself and the Agriculture Committee Chairs in cutting this deal. Leadership in the Senate and House Agriculture Committees had reportedly agreed to an extension over the weekend, but that agreement was scrapped and agriculture committee representatives were cut out of the final fiscal cliff deal-making. This comes after the House leadership refused—since July—to bring the Farm Bill to a vote, with very little political cost to pay. As Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow said on the Senate floor, “There is absolutely no way to explain this other than agriculture is just not a priority.”

What does this mean for the future of the Farm Bill? The next Congress will start from scratch, with the House expected to start working on a new Farm Bill in late February. The Farm Bills that came out of the Senate and the House Agriculture Committee last year will likely be a starting point. But we can also expect that the budgets will be even tighter when Congressional Budget Office issues a new Farm Bill baseline budget in March, so even more cuts will be needed. Two big disagreements remain: one over the shift of commodity programs toward a revenue insurance model (which due to climate change may ultimately result in higher government payouts), and the desire by Tea Party activists to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Politically, it is largely the same players at the Agriculture committees, Congressional leadership and at the White House, all trapped within the same budget-cutting straightjacket. It’s hard to see how real reform can emerge in 2013. But of course, things could get much worse.

In the bigger picture, the New Year’s madness reflects a major blow to the stature of the Farm Bill as an effective policy instrument. It wasn’t farmer or rural interests that drove the final deal, but the threat of higher milk prices for consumers. Even under optimal conditions, the Farm Bill has largely turned a blind eye to some of the biggest issues in the agriculture and food system: climate change, fair prices for all farmers, corporate concentration and marketplace competition, and the treatment of food workers.

In the future, the big policy changes needed in our farm and food system may need to come from beyond the Farm Bill. There are many policy approaches bubbling up at the community and state level, and even in other countries, that could serve as a basis for a new agenda grounded in resiliency (to environmental and economic instability), justice for farmers, workers and consumers, health throughout the food chain, and food sovereignty (community control and ownership of the food system). We can’t afford any more Congressional surprises.  

How could the landscape of food and farming policy change if health sector workers and consumers understood what it takes for farmers to grow and produce enough healthy food?

Earlier this year, IATP and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota created a historic statewide convening to foster dialogue and understanding between the health and agriculture sectors—State of the Plate: Minnesota Healthy Food Futures. Now, that meeting has served as proof of concept for cross-sector meetings in eight additional states: Texas, Illinois, Montana, Oregon, New York, Kansas, Mississippi and Iowa. While the purpose of all the meetings was to begin building bridges between the health and agriculture sectors, many of the meetings also included representatives from the anti-hunger, culinary and philanthropic sectors, among others.

IATP provided technical assistance to each of the states as part of its involvement on the steering team of the national Healthy Farms, Healthy People Coalition, which held the first national cross-sector convening in Washington, D.C. in 2011. That historic national meeting included representatives from diverse organizations such as The Farm Bureau, The American Public Health Association and United Fresh. The coalition also provided financial support for seven of the nine state meetings via a competitive application process that produced 61 proposals. The Minnesota and Illinois meetings received support from local funders and we hope other states will follow suit in 2013.

Participants across all the meetings were energized by the opportunity to learn about key issues from new perspectives and the prospect of new partnerships between the health and agriculture communities. The hope is that working across sectors will foster more innovative food system policy to support public health goals for healthier eating, but also support our farmers’ ability to make a living producing healthier foods like fruits, vegetables and food animals that serve those goals.

Minnesota kicked off the year with its meeting in early January and the year ended with meetings in Iowa and Kansas in mid-November, with most of the other meetings occurring in early fall. The meetings ranged in size from 42 participants in the less populated state of Montana to more than 335 participants in Minnesota, with most of the remaining meetings engaging approximately 75–100 health and agriculture stakeholders.

More than one of the meetings opened with a diverse panel of speakers from different sectors sharing their perspectives on key food system issues. Others opened with a keynote speakers, including Dr. Kelly Brownell of Yale’s Rudd Center who spoke to the Minnesota audience about the need to make healthy food the “optimal default” through policy and environment changes; Bob Martin, senior policy advisor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health made the case to the Kansas audience for a public health perspective on agriculture, particularly the linkages between the growing number of human antibiotic-resistant infections and the widespread use of antibiotics in animal agriculture; and Ken Meter of Crossroads Resource Center described the political economy of the food system in central Illinois and outlined an opportunity to reverse the trend of food and farm dollars flowing out of the region to distant corporations rather than supporting local producers and businesses.

Discussion of local and regional food system issues were prominent at all the meetings, from the Mississippi and Montana meetings which focused on building farm to institution programs in the states, to New York where food business owners participated in discussions about ways to expand consumer access to state products. In Oregon, participants discussed a state law prohibiting undocumented workers from having driver’s licenses threatens to hurt local farms and food businesses across the state, as well as worsen poverty among that population of workers and their families.

Other key issues discussed included the need for better public incentives and crop insurance for producers of fruits and vegetables, the need for scale-appropriate food safety laws that support development of local food systems, the need to reform state procurement laws to allow for more local sourcing and increasing access to federal nutrition programs at farmers markets.

It is our hope that work will continue on these and other key policy issues within the states and through creation of a national community of practice made up of leaders from each of the nine states, as well as others. With all this remarkable work bubbling up at the state level, shared learning about key issues and innovative policy development could spur similar discussions in additional states, as well as drive creation of healthier national food and farming systems policy. 

The 18th annual climate negotiations of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) just ended Saturday night. These government officials had a historic and an urgently critical task at hand:  how to effectively address the increasing climate chaos characterized by extreme storms like Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Bhopa (which recently just devastated several islands in the Philippines), droughts, floods and eerily erratic weather before it’s too late.  

The “Doha Climate Gateway,” as the outcome is being called, resulted in  a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol (the KP) and built the “gateway” for a new climate treaty that is supposed to come into force by 2020. In three year’s time, governments will have to finalize this new treaty that will now be negotiated in a track they call the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP).   

Because the KP’s first commitment period was set to expire this month, the Protocol’s future was uncertain. The U.S. continued to express disdain for the KP, Canada, Japan and Russia pulled out of it and New Zealand’s rejected it. Despite all this, somehow, governments agreed to a second commitment period (minus Japan, Canada, Russia and New Zealand)—but a very weak, almost farcical one. Thirty-five industrialized countries making up about 15 percent of global emissions will be party to the second commitment period, with no enforced total aggregate target for reducing emissions and a “maybe” option for increasing their ambitions for further emissions reductions by 2015. The cruel irony is that all governments in this latest UNFCCC outcome took note “with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.”

In other words: “yes, we governments know that we have a massive gap between what we have said we would do to prevent catastrophic climate change and what is actually needed to prevent it, but hey! Let’s take another three years to figure that out and another eight to bring something binding into force. What’s the rush? We only began this process in 1992.”

The farce becomes apparent when you read the technical fine print of how these governments will meet some of these commitments. According to Carbon Market Daily1 governments did little in Doha to curb the biggest failure of the carbon market:  the oversupply of carbon credits that are already at “rock-bottom” prices. However, governments continued to endorse emissions trading and the Clean Development Mechanism as ways to account for their emissions reductions in the second commitment period. These approaches are heavily criticized by many civil society organizations as not only ineffective in dealing with climate change (since emissions continue to rise), but also because the markets themselves are speculative and deeply flawed. In the last few years, the prices of the credits certified as legitimate by the UNFCCC have crashed from 22 euros to 50 cents.2  Countries like New Zealand, Japan, Canada and Russia will rightly be excluded from claiming “certified emissions reduction” credits from the UNFCCC given that they have not committed to the KP the second time around. Instead, Thomson Reuters reports, Japan will “develop a new market mechanism to help meet a voluntary 2020 emissions pledge” while New Zealand may reduce its own reduction ambitions given that both countries rely heavily on buying credits to compensate or “offset” their own domestic emissions.3

Carbon market proponents want to not only keep these flawed mechanisms in place in the new treaty and but also develop “new market mechanisms” in the interim that will allow for further loopholes for major polluters albeit at a much larger scale (i.e., sectoral trading—estimating emissions reductions across an entire manufacturing sector or landscape that includes agriculture and forestry). These proposals are highly controversial and raise serious questions about environmental integrity. And governments failed to reach agreement over them in Doha. Countries like the U.S., New Zealand and Japan want to put in a framework in place that allows for them to use these market mechanisms to account for their emissions reductions and pay for them without actually having to commit to any legally binding targets. But actual investors think it’s pointless to have yet newer market mechanisms when there are no ambitious binding emissions reductions targets in the first place.  

In spite of these issues, the “new market mechanisms” now have a placeholder in the development of the new treaty because parties have directed the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA) to develop a work program that may or may not be agreed at the next Conference of Parties (COP 19). Elements of this work programme include “means to stimulate mitigation across broad segments of the economy, which are defined by the participating Parties and may be on a sectoral and/or project-specific basis”; hence, the option for sectoral trading, but also carbon accounting (monitoring, reporting and verification) of carbon sinks. These mechanisms can have voluntary participation, but somehow must lead to “standards that deliver real, permanent, additional, and verified mitigation outcomes, avoid double counting of effort and achieve a net decrease and/or avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions.”

What this essentially means is that the fight on environmental integrity and the prospects of the carbon market will continue into the next year and in the formation of the new agreement. The decision invites countries and observers to submit comments on how that might work by March 25, 2013.

The challenging questions about oversupply of credits and the environmental integrity associated with these offset credits, particularly in the clean development mechanism, have been postponed to a review that will take place next year on the CDM. Thomson Reuters reports that investment in the CDM has virtually stopped given that its value has plunged by 95% in the last four years, crushing hopes for investor profits.4   

What about agriculture?

The big fight on the broader issues related to agriculture continued in the SBSTA—one of the four bodies of the UNFCCC charged with scientific and technical advice. The decision reached was the following:

After several interventions by Parties, the SBSTA Chair ruled that there was no consensus amongst Parties to refer this matter to the COP for further consideration…SBSTA would continue its consideration of this agenda item at its thirty-eighth session.

In other words, this will be another fight at the next UNFCCC meeting in April 2013. The fight, as reported in our last blog, is about agriculture emitters looking for ways to account for agriculture emissions through offsetting and trading credits, in particular through flawed approaches such soil carbon sequestration accounting. New proposals from the EU that include “full landscape accounting” would broaden this approach to include forestry and agriculture and create even more room for creative accounting. Developing countries have continued to insist that their agriculture priority is adaptation given climate change’s devastating impacts on food production and food security.

However, there is now a placeholder for this debate to continue under an agenda item in the ADP negotiating track for the new treaty. The ADP track has two workstreams: the first to discuss what the post-2020 agreement will look like; and the second relating to “pre-2020 ambition.” One of the Doha decisions for workstream 2 is to hold a series of workshops and roundtables based on submissions by March 1, 2013 from governments and observers to the UNFCCC on several issues including:

(a)  Mitigation and adaptation benefits, including resilience to the impacts of climate change;

(b) Barriers and ways to overcome them, and incentives for actions;

(c) Finance, technology, and capacity-building to support implementation.

Though seemingly in code, this is a good placeholder for the fight on agriculture mitigation and adaptation—by whom, for whom. The World Bank, along with New Zealand, the United States and other industrial agriculture countries are eager proponents of soil carbon markets and the expansion of land use and land use change accounting to include agriculture. Both New Zealand and Australia are building their own national and sub-national markets that hope to expand coverage to agriculture. Developing countries, particularly African countries, are being “sold” the idea that they would make money off of this by developing their own credits. Carbon markets are dramatically proving otherwise for all credits let alone these types of risky credits. The World Bank hopes to broker these types of credits.

The discussions in SBSTA on the expansion of agriculture credits in LULUCF in the KP track will continue. See IATP’s blog, "What’s at stake for agriculture in COP 18" for more on these discussions.

The one big achievement of the talks was the agreement to address “loss and damage” from the impacts of climate change on developing countries and to develop a mechanism for it. But the U.S. remained adamant that any promises for “aid” for loss and damage need not be additional to what is already being provided under current donor schemes.  

The stage is therefore set for more of the same in the coming years in the climate negotiations—a blueprint for a dramatic shift out of our global crisis was nowhere visible in the Doha outcome.  

People versus the State of Climate Chaos

In the closing plenary of the Kyoto Protocol track, a representative from the government of Philippines made a moving plea:

Have we managed to give justice to what the world demands of us?…as we sit here, every single hour, even as we vacillate and procrastinate here, the death toll is rising. There is massive and widespread devastation. Hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered without homes. And the ordeal is far from over, as Typhoon Bopha has regained some strength as it approaches another populated area in the western part of the Philippines…And I am making an urgent appeal, not as a negotiator, not as a leader of my delegation, but as a Filipino. I appeal to the whole world, I appeal to leaders from all over the world, to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face. I appeal to ministers. The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want. It is about what is demanded of us by 7 billion people.

In the lifetime of the climate treaty, rather than responding to the dire, evolving and new challenges that climate change is bringing to our civilization, government ministries charged with the responsibility have done nothing but cater to the corporations most likely to lose from the concerted and determined actions required to effectively deal with one of the most critical crises of our times. It seems unfathomable—given what has come out of Doha—that these governments will do anything differently next year or in three years unless every citizen (very soon) considers this, quite literally, the very matter of survival of our species on this planet.

1.Thomspson Reuters 2012. U.N. envoys extend Kyoto, agree path to global deal. Carbon Market Daily, Point Carbon News Publication, Vol. 11, Issue 21: December 9.    

2.Ibid.

3.Ibid.

4.Ibid.