Criminal Minds, S1E16 quote

A quote with which I can really relate to ...

Humans are born as social creatures with pack mentality, they will naturally seek to follow the majority, & rarely step outside of social protocol or ethical rules in social gatherings. Neither will they stand up & ask too many questions about the authorities of our society, since they would rather avoid such conflict to keep their conformity.

Nietzsche argues in this quote that to truly be the master of yourself, & to truly grasp the full potential of your life, you have to realize that the ideals & norms of society are hollow & without any real value or justification for their existence. Once you realize this, then you become a much better human.

I believe the ultimate morale behind this quote is that you should not just follow the majority blindly, which is something humans have a natural tendency to do, you have to be critical of the majority, & of the authorities. And you should never be afraid to go against the majority.

Private companies profit from pay-to-play phone calls in US prisons

This is one of the examples of what happens when ethics & religion are disconnected from the general public's everyday life. Ethics is a by-product of faith & religion, regardless of which religion one believes in. But, then the general public is told that religion & ethics has no room in their daily lives.

Businesses do make a big show of conducting their businesses with ethical principles, but then everyone's ethics is different. A robber thinks that the society has done him/her wrong & is liable to pay reparations to him/her. In the same vein, the owner of a company thinks he/she has worked hard to build this business, & hence, cutting costs & increasing profits, at the expense of increasing social misery is all ethical. He/she thinks that as long as he/she is following the minimum law required of him/her, he/she is all good.

Here, the companies are extracting, or a better word would be, "extorting" money out of criminals, alleged & proven, alike. Now, some may think that since these people are criminals, & perhaps, don't have any morals & ethics, of themselves, it's all right to "extort" money out of them for their phone calls to their families. If that's the case, then perhaps, the Pope Francis should not make a habit of visiting prisons on his continental tours.

Regardless, however, as I've blogged in my prior blog posts, most criminals don't want to become criminals in the first place. Their extraneous circumstances made them criminals. Every human wants to put food on the table, clothe themselves & their families, & put a secure roof over their heads. But the unending greed of wealthy individuals to hoard as much money as they can, while keeping the government officials in their pockets, too, leave the poor out in the cold. Then, some people out of that poor public resort to violence & wrong means to support themselves & their families.

Heck, one can see the corruption of these phone companies in that they are offering latest tablets & signing bonuses (or in other words, "bribes") to prison individuals to secure these lucrative phone contracts. Is that exactly ethical or moral from any point of view?

Furthermore, the discrimination at all levels; racial, ethnic, linguistic, & regional etc. creates more misery for members of that poor public. For instance, several laws in US are considered quite harsh for African-Americans, e.g. getting arrested for not paying parking tickets or even sleeping out in park benches. The people who are getting those tickets or fines are not exactly earning 6-figure salaries but struggling to pay for their food, clothes, & rent.

Coming back to this article, these companies are earning exorbitant profits from the misery of people who are put in the so-called prison & justice system. They are essentially making money off of someone else's misery. Those people are of poverty-ridden backgrounds themselves & every nickel & dime they need to spend to talk to their loved ones, who may help them in not becoming further violent, are not going towards their loved ones' food, clothes, & rental payments.

To add insult to injury, company CEOs are actually fighting government laws, which is doing something good for a change, to keep "extorting" the poor.

So, who is the real criminal here? The one who might have been forced by his/her extraneous circumstances to forgo all ethics & morals & resort to violence or someone who is making a 6-figure salary (investors included) & has a complete control of his/her decision to not "bribe" government officials & not only reduce these calling fees but help the government come up with laws in support of reducing such high calling fees?

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https://www.rt.com/usa/312403-prison-phone-call-fees/

Private phone companies are making a pretty penny by nickel-and-diming prison inmates & their families, sometimes to the tune of $2 a minute for in-state phone calls. Yet the exorbitant fees keep taxpayers from footing the bill.

The prison phone industry has been booming since the 1990s. It’s grown to a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies, as people made some 500 million calls totaling more than 6 billion minutes both to & from prisons & jails in 2014 alone, the New York Times reported.

RT’s Lindsay France called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which contracts with Los Angeles County, to set up an account to call a fictional friend at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

“The nice lady on the phone told me that first off, I’d be hit with a nearly $5 sign-up fee, a possible service fee, possible facilities fee depending on where I wanted to call into,” France said. “And when my fictional friend or loved one gets out and I ask for a refund on the money left inside my account, I get hit with a fee then too.”

On top of those fees, France learned that there was no way to determine the per-minute rate of a call until it had been made & paid for.

Anthony Graves spent 18 years on death row accused of a crime for which he was later exonerated. He struggled to maintain communication with his support network at home by phone.

“That was very expensive. It was like 15 dollars for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. So very expensive all the way around. It’s like I said, at the end of the day everyone’s making a dollar now,” he told RT. “The whole rehabilitation thing is going out the window with private industries coming in and making a lot of money.”

Graves isn’t alone in paying such a high price to keep in touch. The Prison Policy Initiative reported that a call from California’s La Verne City Jail to an in-state number requires a connection fee of $12.59 & a per-minute charge of $1.15, amounting to nearly $30 for a 15-minute call.

After a decade of complaints from prison-rights groups & families of inmates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is slowly attempting to rein in the telecom companies.

In August 2013, the FCC instituted interim requirements for interstate long-distance calls, capping rates at $0.21 per minute for debit & pre-paid calls & $0.25 per minute for collect calls. A revised version of the rules went into effect last February. Typical commercial rates ‒ those not involving the prison system ‒ cost a mere $0.04 per minute, according to the NY Times.
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Those rules didn’t affect the cost of in-state calls, however, which the Prison Policy Initiative says comprise 92% of prison phone calls. The agency began focusing on lowering the cost of all calls between prisoners & their loved ones last fall, noting that “the cost of in-state calls remains high, calling fees have mounted, and payments to prisons unrelated to the cost of providing service have escalated, driving up rates.”

The same month that the FCC rules went into effect, Securus Technologies & GTL both offered incentive-laden contracts to one Georgia county, France reported. Securus offered a little over a million-dollar signing bonus for a five-year contract with 110 free tablet computers thrown in, while GTL proposed $1.5 million upfront for a seven-year deal & threw in 150 tablets.

In response to the offers ‒ & knowing that more FCC regulations were likely in the pipeline ‒ the jail’s administrator told the companies: “Since it is highly likely that the FCC will be eliminating all inmate phone commissions in the near future, in lieu of a (MAG) Minimum Annual Guarantee, please discuss alternatives” that “would provide to supplement the loss of jail phone revenues.”

In October [2014], the FCC opened up comments on “a comprehensive, market-based approach to achieving just, fair & reasonable rates for all inmate calling – local, in-state long-distance and out-of-state long distance.” It is also looking at banning so-called “site commissions,” which are payments that prisons demand of the inmate calling service providers & are often used by prisons to pay for services & facilities not related to the cost of hosting calling services. The agency is also seeking to impose permanent rate caps on all of those services, replacing the current, interim ones.

Prison phone call providers are fighting the FCC’s rules, saying that the rate caps have forced them to lose money on those calls.

“We think some of the new rates are below our cost,” Richard Smith, president & CEO of Dallas-based Securus, told Time last February. He said his company handles 120 million calls per year at an average rate of $3.50 per call, & that, while some inmates may have paid $17 per call, those cases were “outliers” made by inmates he believed were pushing an agenda.

“This is a public policy issue,” Smith added, noting that vendors like Securus will end up paying prisons less in site commissions, which totaled $460 million in 2013 ‒ money that cash-strapped facilities will have to make up elsewhere. “Taxes are going to go up,” he said.

Prisoner advocates argue, however, that there’s another public-policy issue involved ‒ that of recidivism.

“If you are an inmate and you have strong ties to your family, the less likely you are to reoffend,” Diane Goldstein, an executive board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told RT. “If you are an inmate that has rehabilitation opportunities inside prison and you get an education and you walk out with a skill the less likely you are to reoffend.”

Growing student debt is entrenching unfairness for a whole generation

Although, this opinion piece is focused on the problem with post-secondary education in UK, & a little bit on US (for comparison purposes), I would say that's the condition of education, & consequently society, mostly everywhere in the world.

Everyone loves to talk about how education is important for everyone in today's society & how education is the key for future economic stability for the nations & financial independence for the individuals. BUT, what no one talks about is how education is keep becoming expensive & jobs are keep becoming dependent on personal & professional networks than mere education.

Education is definitely important & must be attained by everyone. But how can a poor student, & most students are from poor family backgrounds (thanks to the world economy), pay already-exorbitant & ever-increasing school fees? Except a few countries around the world (& you can probably count them on your fingers), most countries have / are cutting their education spending, & hence, education institutes are constantly increasing their fees, which in turn, reduce the chances for a poor student to ever break the cycle of poverty he/she is thrust into & become educated & financially independent.

The fees are increasing because of several factors:

1. Governments at all levels are cutting their education funding. Governments, however, are more than happier to keep increasing their military funding. So, the finite financial power a government has, is being diverted towards making it easier to kill a human than to educate a human.

2. Government officials are being controlled by rich & powerful elites of the country. These elites want a stratified society where masses of poor are at their behest to do their work while they enjoy their days sitting in their golden chairs.

3. Taking the second point further, those rich & powerful elites might have become so rich & powerful through a finance-based economy. For instance, Wall Street has made quite a few individuals rich & powerful in US. Now, those individuals want more & more people to take out loans & hence, get trapped in the continuing & unending cycle of debt. Since, the younger generation keeps being shown the dream that if you get more education, you will one day join those powerful elites, the student enrollment keeps increasing. More student = more student loans, which in turn, helps those rich elites become ever more richer & powerful.

4. Education institutes are becoming more a business than a place to share knowledge. Profit & loss are becoming the focus of the education institutes than increasing the level of humanity through education & hence, making a better society, at the national & global levels. In this quest of making more profits, professors are being given contract jobs with minimum-level wages, while students are being charged ever higher fees.

To make matters worse, & as the opinion piece also mentions, that the earning power of new generation also keeps getting worse & worse. So, the education costs is increasing, which require bigger & bigger loans, but the wages are not keeping up with those education costs either, so it takes longer & longer, decades in most cases, for new graduates to pay off those debts.

As the opinion piece further mentions, education is becoming more "what can I study which will get me more money" instead of "what can I study which will make me a better human". For instance, arts education is being derided for graduating out people who are becoming a drain on the country, since they are not considered useful in money-making professions, whereas, education in Information Technology, Medicine, Engineering, & Business for instance is emphasized because graduates of these faculties have a higher chance of making more money than arts graduates. That's, of course, is creating more graduates with silo mindsets, who are focused more on making money, in any way they can, instead of students who want to love learning their whole lives & want to pursue a more well-rounded education.

Job market is also becoming more network-based than education or even skills-based. Since, education institutes have become "degree-granting industries", they are graduating more & more people with degrees, regardless of whether the society needs those degrees or not. So, a country, & even the world, is ending up being flooded with people with degrees. Every other person is an engineer, an MBA, an accountant, a marketing expert, a communications master & whatnot. Since, there are a finite number of businesses & employers, hiring is being done more on the basis of personal & professional networks than pure merit of education & skills.

All of these factors are resulting in a society, on a national & international level, where more & more graduates are frustrated & depressed with increasing debts & decreasing incomes, an ever-increasing gap between rich & poor, more & more people with multiple degrees but either unemployed or less-than-ideal employment, & a society with siloed mindsets due to the unavailability, & unpopularity, of a rounded education than a quick money-making education.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/student-debt-kick-in-teeth-for-poor-families

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In 2015, English universities are spending £800m on promoting access for disadvantaged students as the quid pro quo for increasing their fees to £9,000 – a patchwork quilt of scholarships, fee-waivers, induction & remedial courses & building links with communities & schools to appeal to students from poorer backgrounds. It seems to be working. Analysis by the recent final report of the Independent Commission on Fees (which I chaired) shows that over the past 5 years the proportion of students from disadvantaged homes has risen markedly.

... If 12,000 more students from poorer homes are enrolling at university than 5 years ago, that hardly compensates for the collapse in part-time student numbers, falling by 152,000 over the same period. The principal cause is fear of debt, a trend that will be accelerated by the ending of maintenance grants in the budget. While part-time numbers are holding up in Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales, which don’t charge £6,750 for part-time courses, they are plunging in England, which does. Part-time foundation degrees, certificates & diplomas of higher education are people’s second chance, especially for the over-25s, who represent four-fifths of the drop. The number of mature students doing full-time degrees is also falling. Together this represents one of the biggest setbacks to social mobility in modern times.

The notion that Britain’s students are simply shrugging off debts that by 2020 will be approaching £50,000 as universities index fees to inflation, bringing them near to £10,000, is far too optimistic. Today’s 16- to 18-year-olds are beginning to worry as much about debt as their older peers. A ComRes opinion survey commissioned by the Sutton Trust reports that 78% of young people were concerned as potential students about the cost of living, 68% by high tuition fees & 58% by having to repay student loans. They are right. The US is often quoted as the country whose system of student funding most cloesely corresponds to England’s, but because of generous scholarships in private universities & very low fees charged by many state universities, only 70% of US students graduate with debt, which in any case only averages £22,750. In Britain, all students graduate with debt almost twice the US level.

Already in the US there are grave concerns about the social implications. Couples are waiting longer before they marry; the birthrate is falling; home ownership among under-40s is plummeting; & the rate of small business formation by young people is decreasing. As loan default rates rise, the whole exercise threatens to become self-defeating.The consequences in England promise to be more pronounced. Property prices in relation to income are much higher & graduates shouldering student debt are in no position to save up the huge deposit needed to buy a home. Moreover, the fee regime is interacting with a collapse in young people’s real wages – down more than 10% since 2008.

Britain is in the process of creating the most stratified, least socially mobile, cruelly unfair society in
its treatment of the young in the advanced world. The over-50s, rejoicing in the untaxed capital gains they enjoy from buying property a generation ago, will help their own kids, but are not asked to help anyone else’s. As in the US, family formation, the birthrate, home ownership & small business startups are all beginning to be affected & parents will work far into old age to try to help their children. All this to ensure that the allegedly malevolent state is shrunk.

Worse, the debt is structured so that the compound interest rate effect of not paying it off early makes it even more onerous, an effect vastly more likely to hit students from disadvantaged homes. Yes, more are getting to university but, with a few exceptions, not the top ones whose degrees are most valued by employers. Students from advantaged neighbourhoods are 10 times more likely to go to a Russell Group university than those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So not only do students from poorer homes have parents not rich enough to be able to help them, their earning power will be less. George Osborne’s legacy, ranging from relaxing inheritance tax to allowing parents to leave their pension pot to their kids & eliminating maintenance grants, will be a society in which the rich are better able to help their indebted children, while the disadvantaged will be left as bottom-tier citizens, renting homes while engaged in a lifelong struggle to repay their student debt. Three-quarters will be paying off loans in their 50s.

And as in the US, default rates are rising. The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills now thinks that 45% of the loans for full-time students will never be repaid, along with 65% of loans to part-time students; the taxpayer will pick up the bill. Indeed, the default rate is now so high that the system is nearly as costly as the low-fee regime it replaced. Meanwhile, universities are finding that more students want to do degrees more likely to deliver high salaries; little by little, they are being transformed from centres of rounded academic teaching & research excellence across the gamut of subjects to high-class employment agencies.

Is any of this what we want as a society? Is it so important that the state consumes only 35.5% of GDP rather than, say, 37% that we are prepared to sacrifice social mobility, entrench class, lower home ownership, enslave a generation to debt & diminish the idea of the university? At the very least, average debt levels should be no higher than those in the US, with many more concessions for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is too big a cause to be marginalised as that of the “left”. It is everyone’s – & time mainstream politicians spoke up.


Will Hutton is principal of Hertford College, Oxford

"The Fifth Estate" movie quote

Ending the cycle of gang violence in El Salvador

This article points to a primary reason why violence is so rampant in developing countries & increasing at a fast rate in developed countries, too. The primary reason for youths & young people to join gangs, or simply be involved in street violence, is the spreading hopelessness for their future, which in turn, is happening because of increasing poverty & a lack of respectable work opportunities.

There's a saying that an empty mind is a devil's abode. As long as a person, especially a young one, keep himself / herself busy, they will be happy. Problem is with what are they keeping themselves busy. Is it something constructive or destructive?

Many of these youths are uneducated. It's not because they don't want any education, but because, the education system has become so expensive everywhere around the world that, even in the developed countries of North America & Europe (except a few countries), a youth & his / her family has to think twice before going to a post-secondary institution. Due to economic reasons, if he / she chooses something else over education, then cycle of violence starts. Heck, even if he / she is educated, he / she may still chooses to be involved in violence. And it's for a simple reason that he / she & his family needs food, clothing, & a roof over their heads.

Jobs, even for educated youths, are becoming scarce all over the world. Everywhere it's all about connections & networking. That doesn't help a large swath of young population who may not have the right connections because their parents & friends only know of people who are in the similar circumstances as they are.

Economic situations, the wrong result of capitalism (hoarding of wealth by a few rich individuals), the increasing social & wealth gap between rich & poor are all leading towards more misery & poverty for the billions around the world. Austerity measures in the name of economy is only creating more misery for the poor, while wealth is actually increasing for the rich. Wealthy families are simply sitting on their giant piles of cash instead of investing in the economy to create more jobs, which in turn, is only going to create more work opportunities for the youths.

Many youths, who are already involved in violence, also want to get out of that violent life, but they see no future in earning a honest buck. Because, there's more hopelessness in their future going down that route. In one of earlier posts, ex-convicts in US told how the justice & prison systems is made to trap a convict in a life of continuing violence. No one wants to take a chance on a youth who might have done something wrong in their life. If nobody offers them a second chance, they will of course re-offend & goes back into the for-profit prison system.

Furthermore, if the youths are busy with the right kind of "work", instead of killing & looting their fellow compatriots, they will not only be putting food on their families' table, clothing their kids, & putting roof over their families, they will also be feeling satisfied & fulfilled to be earning compensation from a non-violent line of work. Governments, & of course, the wealthy people, will also be reaping rewards with fewer criminals out on the streets & more tax-paying individuals. It is a win-win result for everyone in a society.

But the problem is how many rich individuals are willing to take that first step of investing in the young populations of their countries?

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-33750162

It is Sunday morning in San Salvador & San Rafael hospital's accident & emergency department is full.

People are lying in the corridors on spare hospital beds waiting their turn.

Those who can sit up are in wheelchairs ... .
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June saw 677 murders in El Salvador, more than any other month since the country's civil war ended in 1992.

Juan - not his real name - is lucky not to be another number in those grisly statistics. 37 years old, he runs a recycling business & a carwash. 4 men arrived at his work & opened fire: 40 bullets.

"Thank God just one bullet hit my arm," he tells me from his hospital bed.

Juan says in the 20 years he has had his own business he has never given in to gangs trying to extort money from him. ...

The police never came to see him to find out what happened. And did he go to them to report it?

"What's the point? I don't believe in the system," he says. He is now making plans to leave the country with his wife & 2 children.
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Faith

On the outskirts of the capital, San Salvador, is a factory that is trying to pick up the pieces ... . It is not long after dawn & all the workers at League Central America are gathered outside. Everyone listens intently to a motivational speech followed by prayers.

Once that is over, work begins. Most of the more than 400 employees are sat behind sewing machines, sewing on labels or cutting material that is used to make sweatshirts & shorts.

All the clothes here are branded with American university logos such as Harvard & Brown & sent to the US.

Just over one in 10 are former gang members, from both the rival gangs - the Mara Salvatrucha & the 18th Street gang. You can tell their affiliation by the tattoos that some of them still have. Up until a few years ago, it used to be standard if you were a gang member.

But tattoos apart, they have started new lives here. One of them - I'll call him Jorge to protect his identity - came to work here through a church group. That is a prerequisite to work here.

After years of robbing, extorting, attacking & even killing several people, he decided to give it all up.

"It didn't make any sense, I was bored of it," he tells me. "I was fed up with suffering. I was in the street all the time.

"My daughter was born and I didn't want her to go through the same thing I had gone through."

The only thing left of his gang days is the tattoo. He pulls down his lower lip to show it to me - carved out with a knife, it is inked with the words MS - to mark him out as a Mara. He says though that gang violence is getting worse.

"They go around killing police, soldiers," he says. "It's partly because of the lack of work, the poverty.

"There are lots of former gang members who want to change their lives but they don't have a way out, nobody gives them an opportunity. So they go back to what they used to do."

Jorge was lucky. He is now one of the chief pattern cutters at League Central America & is thankful for another chance at life.

'No choice'

"People join gangs because they have to. They join because they have no other choice," says Carly Gerstman, the development manager at League Central America.

"We've found that they have the motivation and they have the drive and they have the appreciation that, you know, we are bringing them back in and we are giving them this opportunity, and they take it and they run with it."

Company boss Rodrigo Bolanos says businesses need to play a part in solving the cycle of violence.

"The war between the government and gang members is already here, it's already started," he says.

"In the process of suffocating the economy and the country the private companies need to take a position to look for a dignified way out."

Just growing more food won't help to feed the world

I liked this article because of couple of reasons:

1. As it states in its first paragraph that "we already grow enough food for 10 billion people." Now, I don't know where this author got this number of 10 billion, but the fact it is stating is definitely true. Many people commonly comment after hearing that billions are malnourished in the world & the world needs more resources to cope with increasing population that the world needs less people & hence, the public around the world needs to reduce their birth rate.

Problem is not high or low birth rate. Problem of how the world is going to sustain 9 billion people in the next 35 years is not going to be resolved by reproducing less. Problem lies with inefficiency & unequal distribution of existing resources. Our world is more than capable of producing more than enough resources to sustain billions more, but nothing is sustainable when those resources are tightly controlled by a few rich elites, at the individual level & the national level.

As per latest Oxfam report, the world has 62 billionaires who have as much wealth as half of the world's population (that's 3.5 billion). Do these billionaires need all that wealth to comfortably live in this world? Of course not. A human's wish to comfortably live in this world can be fulfilled with a very few needs. But hoarding cash, or resources, only makes the world more unequal, & hence, unsustainable for billions of poor around the world.

Then, we got inequality at the national level. As the article also suggests, the global north, or economically rich countries, not only overconsume, but also waste a lot of food, & in general, resources. Lots of African & Middle Eastern countries are thirsty for water & wasting water to make swimming pools & lush green lawns are a "necessity" in US & Canada. Obesity is a major health problem in the global north because people cannot stop stuffing their faces, while malnourishment, or even famine, is rampant in the global south.

2. Control of agricultural practices by a few giant industrial companies, e.g. Monsanto. People readily say that GMO seeds & chemicals (i.e. fertilizers, pesticides etc.) are required to grow more food in fewer areas, since, we need to grow more food to feed the increasing population.

As the article once again stresses the point that these giant agricultural companies don't help the environment & the agricultural practices by forcing small-scale farmers to buy special seeds from them only & grow specific crops. I am not against GMO seeds since I don't even know if they do cause cancer or not. But I do know that forcing farmers to grow specific crops, which are more of money makers (cash crops) than letting them diversify which crops are grown (which helps in keeping the soil nourished in the natural way, instead of through chemicals) destroy the soil longevity.

Now, the article also provides a few recommendations to improve agricultural practices to increase efficiency & reduce unnecessary losses in losing vital crops. I, on the other hand, am less optimistic that these recommendations will ever be implemented by international organizations & companies, because giant agricultural companies, like Monsanto, heavily lobby organizations, at national & international levels, to help extend their own agendas (increase profitability & share prices) at the expense of environment & people's lives & health.

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http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/29/growing-more-food-wont-help-feed-world-agriculture-climate-resilient 

The World Bank’s view that we need to grow 50% more food by 2050 to feed 9 billion people, while finding ways to reduce carbon emissions from agriculture at the same time, ignores one very simple fact – we already grow enough food for 10 billion people.

But a combination of storage losses after harvest, overconsumption & waste mean that some 800 million people in developing countries are malnourished.

The storage losses mainly affect the global south ... Overconsumption & waste mainly affect the global north.

The challenge of feeding the world is not simply met through increases in production – this is precisely how the so-called green revolution created our current problems.

The answer lies in increasing the climate resilience of agriculture in ways that reverse the catastrophic environmental degradation of the last 50 years while also making production more efficient.

The green revolution that took place in the 1960s, increasing cereal production in developing countries, is credited with saving a billion lives. But today the environmental toll from this boom is all too evident.

The statistics tell the story – 38% of the planet’s cropland is degraded, 11% of the irrigated area is salt contaminated, 90% of the biodiversity of the 20 main staple crops has been lost, nitrogen fertiliser produces 6% of greenhouse gases & its runoff creates 400 marine “dead zones” (areas where oxygen concentration is so low that animal life suffocates), & more than 350,000 people die every year from pesticide toxicity.

Research on planetary boundaries estimates that nitrogen fertiliser use needs to decline by 75% to avoid large-scale environmental impact of this kind. The focus on productivity over efficiency has meant that the amount of energy needed to grow the same quantity of food has increased by between one-quarter & one-third over the last 25 years. Even without climate change, conventional chemical agriculture is driving humanity towards a food-security cliff.

A Christian Aid briefing paper argues that if we are to reverse this situation in the face of climate change, agriculture needs a transformative change in the way it addresses climate resilience.

Small-scale farmers & pastoralists, who manage 60% of agricultural land & produce 50% of the planet’s food, should be central to this agenda. Research to solve their problems should be guided by their priorities, & take place largely on their farms.

The kind of support farmers want often includes advice on soil management & testing, reliable climate forecasts, & development of their own seed & livestock breeding processes. The advice they get usually revolves around unaffordable chemical fertilisers & pesticides, while their ability to exchange & sell locally adapted crop seeds is threatened by corporate-inspired legislation promoting crop varieties developed in distant biotech labs.
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For farmers to invest in resilience, they need secure land tenure, especially when they participate in communal land-tenure systems. Land deals with largely foreign buyers have increased to 55 million hectares. This not only dispossesses farmers but also undermines the confidence that others need to invest in measures to control land erosion, in trees & in other adaptations that pay off over several years.

Activities that degrade soils, forests & other vital catchment protection resources inevitably result in greater vulnerability downstream – through flood damage, increased exposure to cyclones & more intense drought, all of which affect food production.

The good news is that by empowering farmers to develop climate resilient agriculture, it is possible to envisage the elimination of extreme hunger in 15 years. The conservation of resources & use of environment-enhancing approaches, such as conservation agriculture, agroforestry & integrated pest management, have been shown to yield more & deliver significantly better resilience to climate extremes than conventional, chemical agriculture. Such practices also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, increasing access to markets can turn agriculture into an engine that drives diversified, sustainable rural economies.

The World Bank’s call for climate-smart agriculture includes focusing on sustainable water use, countering gender inequality, & increased research.

It should also acknowledge the need for a truly three-dimensional approach to reversing the environmental degradation & climate change that “20th-century technology” has caused. Such an approach would include plans to strengthen the review of World Bank Environmental & Social Safeguards to ensure lending enables, rather than undermines, climate resilience for small-scale farmers & pastoralists in developing countries.


Richard Ewbank is climate advisor for Christian Aid

"Testing Stress" by Nate Beeler

"Testing Stress" - Nate Beeler, The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, OH, US