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Global warming: Just what overcrowded, polluted India didn’t need… the $3,000 car
Andrew Buncombe, The Independent
India’s economy is booming but its roads are a throwback to pre-industrial times. That is about to change when a flood of cheap vehicles come on the market.
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Anyone wishing to escape the human crush of India’s teeming capital to visit the marble splendour of the Taj Mahal can travel by train in just two painless hours. Alternatively, they can struggle to negotiate the crowded single-lane road that heads south to the city of Agra in a journey that can take up five hours.
But if India’s roads seem cluttered and inadequate, things are set to get much worse. Over the coming months, a series of car manufacturers are set to unveil new models aimed at India’s burgeoning middle class. Remarkably, some of the new cars designed to entice the wallets of India’s newly wealthy consumers will be priced as cheaply as $3,000 (£1,500). One model, due to be available as early as next year, has been dubbed the “People’s Car”.
This explosion of new affordable vehicles is poised to have a number of dramatic effects on the country – most visibly adding further traffic to roads that are often filled with rickshaws, bicycles, people and animals.
Yet while consumer demand for such vehicles is high, there are also considerable concerns about the environmental impact these countless thousands of new cars will have, not just in terms of adding to the congestion of India’s cities, but increasing the already mounting emissions of CO2 the country is pumping out.
(22 June 2007)
Displacing farmers: India Will Have 400 million Agricultural Refugees
Devinder Sharma, Share The Worlds Resources
It was on the cards. With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announcing the formation of a new rehabilitation policy for farmers displaced from land acquisitions, it is now official — farmers have to quit agriculture.
Ever since the Congress-led UPA Coalition assumed power after an angry rural protest vote threw out the erstwhile BJP-led NDA combination in May 2004, the Prime Minister had initiated a plethora of new policies for the spread of industrialization. After having laid the policy framework that allows private control over community resources – water, biodiversity, forests, seeds, agriculture markets, and mineral resources — the UPA government finally looked at the possibility of divesting the poor people of their only economic security – a meagre piece of land holding.
“Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is an idea whose time has come,” the Prime Minister had said at an award ceremony in Mumbai sometimes back. Supported by all political parties, including the Left Front, he has actually officiated a nationwide campaign to displace farmers.
…At a conference organised by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai a few years back, he quoted the World Bank to say that the number of people estimated to migrate from rural to urban India by the year 2015 is expected to be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany.
The combined population of UK, France and Germany is 200 million. The World Bank had therefore estimated that some 400 million people would be willingly or unwillingly moving from the rural to urban centres by 2015. Subsequent studies have shown that massive distress migration will result in the years to come. For instance, 70 per cent of Tamil Nadu, 65 per cent of Punjab, and nearly 55 per cent of Uttar Pradesh is expected to migrate to urban centres by the year 2020.
These 400 million displaced will constitute the new class of migrants – agricultural refugees. Twice the number of people that are expected to be displaced by global warming worldwide are alone be pushed out of agriculture in India.
Acerbating the crisis are the policy initiatives that promotes privatization of natural resources, take over of farm land, integrating Indian agriculture with the global economy, and moving farmers out of agriculture – in essence the hallmark of the neo-liberal economic growth model.
Agricultural reforms that are being introduced in the name of increasing food production and minimising the price risks that the farmers continue to be faced with, are actually aimed at destroying the production capacity of the farm lands and would lead to further marginalisation of the farming communities.
Devinder Sharma is a food and agriculture policy analyst.
(23 June 2007)
Also at Znet.
Carbon emissions: China no longer has any excuse to wait
Jerome a Paris, The Oil Drum: Europe
…That “relatively low per capita level of emissions” [for China] was a very real argument when Kyoto was first drafted, as we were talking about a different order of magnitude in individual emissions, and China had a point when they said that it would be unfair to ‘penalize’ their development (ignoring right now, of course, the fundamental debate about whether it would actually have ‘penalised’ them to take a lead over the West in sustainable development) by curbing their emissions – in essence, their argument was to let the first world tackle the problem, which it substantially created, first, before China did anything.
But now, we see that Chinese per capita emissions are equal to half the British ones, and two thirds of the French ones, and are set to overtake the latter before the end of this decade. On current trends, they will catch up with US per capita emissions before 2020. And current trends in that respect are largely driven by regulatory and investment decisions already made or made in the next few years – as regards power production, as regards environmental standards for cars, as regards construction standards and their enforcement – so they no longer have the luxury to wait and see.
(22 June 2007)
