Sustainable Development - Syracuse Uni paper

• THE TERM ‘SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’ CAME INTO USE IN POLICY

CIRCLES AFTER THE PUBLICATION of the Brundtland Commission’s report on
the global environment and development in 1987. This report led directly to the term
‘sustainable development’ passing into policy discourse, if not into everyday
language.
• Since the path-breaking deliberations of the Brundtland Commission, the expression
‘sustainable development’ has been used in a variety of ways, depending on whether
it is employed in an academic context or that of planning, business or environmental
policy. As a result, during the last 18 years we have been confronted with several
different discourses of ‘sustainable development’, some of which are mutually
exclusive.
• With hindsight we can see that each scientific problem resolved by human
intervention using fossil fuels and manufactured materials is conventionally viewed as
a triumph of management, and a contribution to economic good, when it might also be
seen as a future threat to sustainability. In the 1970s there was a fear that our major
environmental problems would be associated with resource scarcities
• At the beginning of the 21st century we are faced by another challenge: that the
means we have used to overcome resource scarcity, including substitution of some
natural resources, and ‘cleaner’ environmental products and services, may have
contributed to the next generation of environmental problems.
• The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as ‘. . . development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs’ - Development that meets the needs of the
present generation without compromising the ability of future generations’ to meet
their needs.
• One question that this definition is that of needs. The needs of one society may be
quite different from the needs of some other society. For instance, if one society
values open green spaces and seeks to minimize urbanization, this goes against the
need of another society that is okay with giving up green-spaces for more buildings
and skyscrapers. These different needs are very hard to reconcile, and hence it is not
clear what sustainable development of the world in its entirety would look like, hence
it is important that we define needs differently.
• It is precisely this kind of trade-off that is apparent in developing countries today,
when the gains from accelerated economic growth promise immediate rewards, and
environmental mitigation appears largely to benefit the rich world. Furthermore, how
do we establish which course of action is more sustainable? Recourse to the view that
societies must decide for themselves is not very helpful, since environmental pollution
is not localized.
• In response to “What is to be sustained” some argue that it is the present rate of
production that is to be sustained. “With the increasing global population, if countries
like India and China continue to grow as quickly as they are now, a greater chunk of
there population will become part of the middle or upper middle class. This will result
in the changing of their “needs”. Families might want to own a car or a tv set, similar
to those in the west.
• Discounting the future in favour of the present is much easier to do in materially poor
societies, where a lot of people are just trying to survive.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• When it comes to food, human beings have to many options. The decision paralysis
caused by this is called “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”.
• Industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires
expert help to ascertain.
• Where most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that have three carbon
atoms, corn (along with a small handful of other species) make compounds that have
four: hence "C-4," the botanical nickname for this gifted group of plants. By
recruiting extra atoms of carbon during each instance of photosynthesis, the corn plant
is able to limit its loss of water and "fix"—that is, take from the atmosphere and link
in a useful molecule— significantly more carbon than other plants.
• "High yield" is a fairly abstract concept, and I wondered what it meant at the level of
the plant: more cobs per stalk? more kernels per cob? Neither of the above, Naylor
explained. The higher yield of modern hybrids stems mainly from the fact that they
can be planted so close together, thirty thousand to the acre instead of eight thousand
in his father's day. Hybrids have been bred for thicker stalks and stronger root
systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd and withstand mechanical harvesting.
• You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquility of
such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob.
This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every
other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other,
precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There
are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist Utopia turns
out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
• More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose
hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which
from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn
it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into
food.
• One problem with factories, as compared to biological systems, is that they tend to
pollute. Hungry for fossil fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed it far more than it
can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they buy. Maybe it's applied at the
wrong time of year; maybe it runs off the fields in the rain; maybe the farmer puts
down extra just to play it safe. "They say you only need a hundred pounds per acre. I
don't know. I'm putting on up to two hundred. You don't want to err on the side of too
little," Naylor explained to me, a bit sheepishly. "It's a form of yield insurance."
• But what happens to the one hundred pounds of synthetic nitrogen that Naylor's corn
plants don't take up? Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and
contributes to global warming. (Ammonium nitrate is transformed into nitrous oxide,
an important greenhouse gas.) Some seeps down to the water table. When I went to
pour myself a glass of water in the Naylors' kitchen, Peggy made sure I drew it from a
special faucet connected to a reverse-osmosis filtration system in the basement. As for
the rest of the excess nitrogen, the spring rains wash it off Naylor's fields, carrying it
into drainage ditches that eventually spill into the Raccoon River.
• By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet's composition of species and shrink its
biodiversity.
• What I was hoping George Naylor could help me understand is, if there's so much
corn being grown in America today that the market won't pay the cost of producing it,
then why would any farmer in his right mind plant another acre of it? The answer is
complicated, as I would learn, but it has something to do with the perverse economics
of agriculture, which would seem to defy the classical laws of supply and demand; a
little to do with the psychology of farmers; and everything to do with farm policies,
which underwent a revolution right around the time George Naylor was buying his
first tractor.
• Government farm programs once designed to limit production and support prices (and
therefore farmers) were quietly rejiggered to increase production and drive down
prices. Put another way, instead of supporting farmers, during the Nixon
administration the government began supporting corn at the expense of farmers. Corn,
already the recipient of a biological subsidy in the form of synthetic nitrogen, would
now receive an economic subsidy too, insuring its final triumph over the land and the
food system.
• This is more or less what New Deal farm programs attempted to do. For storable
commodities such as corn, the government established a target price based on the cost
of production, and whenever the market price dropped below that target, the farmer
was given a choice. Instead of dumping corn onto a weak market (thereby weakening
it further), the farmer could take out a loan from the government—using his crop as
collateral—that allowed him to store his grain until prices recovered. At that point, he
 sold the corn and paid back the loan; if corn prices stayed low, he could elect to keep
the money he'd borrowed and, in repayment, give the government his corn, which
would then go into something that came to be called, rather quaintly, the "Ever-
Normal Granary."
• The system, which remained in place more or less until shortly before George Naylor
came back to the farm in the 1970s, did a fairly good job of keeping corn prices from
collapsing in the face of the twentieth century's rapid gains in yield. Surpluses were
held off the market by the offer of these "nonrecourse loans," which cost the
government relatively little, since most of the loans were eventually repaid. And when
prices climbed, as a result of bad weather, say, the government sold corn from its
granary, which helped both to pay for the farm programs and smooth out the
inevitable swings in price.
• I say this system remained in place "more or less" until the 1970s because, beginning
in the 1950s, a campaign to dismantle the New Deal farm programs took root, and
with every new farm bill since then another strut was removed from the structure of
support. Almost from the start, the policy of supporting prices and limiting production
had collected powerful enemies: exponents of laissez-faire economics, who didn't see
why farming should be treated differently than any other economic sector; food
processors and grain exporters, who profited from overproduction and low crop
prices; and a coalition of political and business leaders who for various reasons
thought America had far too many farmers for her (or at least their) own good.
• The invention of commodity grain severed any link between the producer of a
foodstuff and its ultimate consumer. A commodity is like a filter, stripping qualities
and histories from the harvest of a particular farm and farmer.

• People in Delhi produce 10,000 tonnes of garbage. Almost all of it ends up in 3

landfills that surround the city - Bhalswa, Ghazipur, and Okhla. The Bhosla landfill
was supposed to close in 2012 but it still accepts garbage.
• Almost 75,000 people work as rag pickers. They separate different kinds of waste
(glass, plastic, etc) and sell it. They earn about 200-300 Rs a day. Platic and metal are
the most valuable items.
• The Bhalswa landfill does not have a proper drainage system. So contaminated water
from the landfill finds it way into the groundwater.
• People near the landfills live under unbearable conditions - Flies everywhere, odour
from the landfill.
• Trash that decomposes releases methane, which results in landfill fires. These fires
burn the waste and release sulphur and nitrogen oxides. Short term exposure can
cause Tuberculosis while long-term exposure can cause cancer.
Water
- 40% of the world’s citizens do not have access to clean tap water.
Most of these people reside in the global south.

- In 2011, private water firms supplied over 900 million people, up from
50 million in 1990

- The privatization of public water services in the global South was

largely imposed, especially during the 1990s, through World Bank
and IMF loan conditions and structural adjustment programs
requiring states to open public utilities for sale, lease, or concession.

- Yet the result of two decades of private sector involvement, many

observers concur, has been a failure by the market to meet the stated
goal of “water for all” in the global South.

- Even the World Bank has since acknowledged that privatization has
generated social discontent but neither suRicient profits nor
adequate numbers of new water connections

- The privatization of water supply and sanitation in Bolivia took place

during the second mandate of Bolivian President Hugo Banzer (1997-
2001) in the form of two major private concessions: one in La Paz/El
Alto to Aguas del Illimani S.A. (AISA), a subsidiary of the
French Suez (formerly Lyonnaise des Eaux) in 1997; and a second
one in Cochabamba to Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the
multinationals Biwater and Bechtel in 1999.

- The World Bank and the International Development Bank highlighted

water privatization as a requirement for the Bolivian government in
order to retain ongoing state loans.[1] Bechtel Corporation of the
United States oRered a deal with the Bolivian government in order to
privatize water and profit.

- Renouncing the deal was seen as unthinkable to the leaders who felt
pressure to keep the trust of international investors, as the economic
crisis in Argentina was partly caused by a loss of credibility with
international bankers.[2]
- Many of the poorest neighborhoods were not connected to the
network of water systems, and paid even more for lower quality water
from trucks and handcarts. Cooperative wells were built before the
privatization could be expanded on and taken over by the Bechtel
subsidiary at the expense of those who used the well and who had
already paid for the existing structure.

Bottled water
The dramatic surge in bottled water consumption has spawned a global
industry. The international bottled water market—expected to surpass
$65 billion in 2012 (Boreal Water News 2010)—is dominated by four
food and beverage giants: Nestlé, Danone, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi-Cola.

These firms are developing high-capacity bottling plants to extract

groundwater worldwide (Barlow 2007; Packaging Digest 2010; Rodwan
2011). The water itself can be global as well. According to Barlow,
almost

25 percent of all bottled water crosses national borders, with firms often
taking “water from poor communities in the global South to sell to rich
markets in the global North” (2007:84).

The large majority of bottled water extracted in southern nations,

however, is consumed locally. Increasingly, the transnational bottled
water firms are buying up local companies and targeting middle- (and
upper-) class consumers, while the remaining local vendors, often
unregulated, supply many poorer residents with water of uncertain
quality at far higher prices than their wealthier neighbors pay for tap
water (Girard 2009).

Prices for bottled water are dramatically higher than for tap water,
ranging from 240 to 10,000 times more per unit volume.

The environmental impact of bottled water is also substantial. Its

production and distribution consume between 1,000 and 2,000 times
more energy per unit volume than local tap water, and U.S. bottled water
consumption requires the energy equivalent of between 32 and 54
million barrels of oil per year
Bottled water’s negative externalities also include the impact of the
extraction itself on springs and rivers, local ecosystems, agriculture,
wells, and other water users.

McCloud, California, situated at the foot of Mount

Shasta in the state’s far north, and Cascade Locks, Oregon, located in
the Columbia River gorge 40 miles east of Portland. Both are
economically distressed former mill towns that have recently been riven
by proposals by Nestlé Waters to tap local springs and establish high-
capacity water bottling plants.

McCloud, California
An unincorporated hamlet of just over 1,200 residents, McCloud was
long a company town owned by the local lumber mill. The timber
industry faded in the 1990s, and the mill closed entirely in 2002, pushing
the town’s unemployment rate to over 20 percent. In September 2003,
oRicials of the McCloud Community Services District (MCSD) voted to
approve a contract with Nestlé that had been negotiated in secret, with
no public input. The contract would have allowed the firm to build the
nation’s largest water bottling plant, giving it access to 520 million
gallons of water from local springs annually for 99 years as a customer
of
the services district. Although Nestlé would have paid the district only
$0.00008 per gallon (one cent for each 123 gallons of water), far below
industry norms, the contract would have generated $350,000 annually
for MCSD, whose total revenues were close to $1 million (Conlin 2008b).
After several legal challenges, Nestlé was obligated to prepare an
environmental impact report required by California law, which slowed

approval significantly. In the meantime, local opposition became orga-

nized. Several local residents formed the McCloud Watershed Council

(MWC), which worked in coalition with angler groups Trout Unlimited

and California Trout, and later collaborated separately with Food and
Water Watch.
When Nestlé announced in 2008 that it would dramatically reduce the
size of the proposed plant, Business Week described the case as a
“cau-
tionary tale for any company. [Formerly], multinationals could arrive in

economically depressed communities and pretty much have their way.

But in the age of hyper-connectedness, residents in McCloud were able

to turn their issue into an international sensation. Now Nestlé has

capitu-
lated” (Conlin 2008a). Then in September 2009, Nestlé rescinded its

McCloud proposal entirely, saying it no longer had a need for the site.
Only a few months earlier, the firm had reached agreement with city
oRicials in Sacramento, California, to build a large plant there to bottle
municipal water, which began operation in 2010.