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      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

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      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

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      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

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      The World’s Election

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      The world is anxiously watching the election, with the candidates far apart on issues such as the climate crisis and nuclear weapons
      by Julian Borger in Washington

      Main image:
      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      Foreign policy barely gets a mention in this US election, but for the rest of the world the outcome on 3 November will arguably be the most consequential in history.
      All US elections have a global impact, but this time there are two issues of existential importance to the planet – the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation – on which the two presidential candidates could hardly be further apart.
      Also at stake is the idea of “the west” as a like-minded grouping of democracies who thought they had won the cold war three decades ago.
      “The Biden versus Trump showdown in November is probably the starkest choice between two different foreign policy visions that we’ve seen in any election in recent memory,” said Rebecca Lissner, co-author of An Open World, a new book on the contest for 21st-century global order.
      In an election which will determine so much about the future of America and the world, the Trump campaign has said very little about its intentions, producing what must be the shortest manifesto in the annals of US politics.
      It appeared late in the campaign and has 54 bullet points, of which five are about foreign policy – 41 words broken into a handful of slogans such as: “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans”.
      The word “climate” does not appear, but there are two bullet points on partnering with other countries to “clean up” the oceans, and a pledge to “Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air”. (The phrase ignores a series of US scandals about poor water quality – and the fact that millions of Americans can no longer afford their water bills.)
      The US remains the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and the average American’s carbon footprint is twice that of a European or Chinese citizen. More

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      Former Republican congressman says Murdoch's media outlets fuelling 'climate rejectionism'

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      A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. 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      The Guardian view on Boris Johnson's Cop26: ask if GDP growth is sustainable | Editorial

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      Saving the planet ought to be a goal for, not a cost to, humanity. Yet this insight appears lost in the discussion about the climate emergency. Last week, it emerged that the Treasury was thinking about levying a UK-wide carbon tax. This approach, it was suggested, could be sold as a way of “raising revenue while cutting emissions”. Properly targeted taxes can change behaviour. But “revenue raising” green policies invariably end up being valued by the amount of taxes they produce rather than on their effectiveness in combating the climate crisis. UK governments have frozen fuel duties for a decade because it is politically easier to rake in cash than deter driving.A carbon tax is superficially appealing. The Treasury desires taxes to offset government spending. No 10 would like to align, rhetorically, with the green agenda. But without careful thought a carbon levy could backfire. A maladroit attempt to tax fuel on environmental grounds kindled France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests.By law, Britain has to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. To get there, life in the country will have to change. For example, for the next stage of a net-zero transition, the public should shift away from heating their homes with gas boilers. Raising taxes on voters until they squeal and switch to lower carbon intensive heating systems would not be popular or necessarily progressive. A better strategy would be for the state to finance new green technologies and to regulate energy companies to recoup the investment. The Treasury dislikes spending and then taxing. Rightwing governments resist interfering in markets. But a focus on ecological sustainability would provide a reason to act in such a way.The UK government requires an environmental sense of purpose that specifies the appropriate ends for economic activity. The economist Kate Raworth has pointed out that a failure to do so has left a gap, which politicians fill by maximising national income. They are not obliged to ask if additional economic growth is sustainable. Governments ought to confront whether the growth of real GDP is too destabilising for global ecosystems. For decades the planetary boundary for resource use has been exceeded because conventional economics has encouraged political leaders to concentrate on goals that are largely irrelevant to human welfare.A confluence of world events provides a rare opportunity to change such thinking. Owing to the pandemic, global greenhouse emissions are forecast to drop by about 5% this year, compared with 2019. If sustained this would be the largest year-to-year drop since the second world war, and it could mark a turning point. If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election the world’s top three emitters, China, the US and the EU, which account for nearly half of global emissions, should all have mid-century net-zero targets, placing the 1.5˚C warming limit of the Paris agreement within reach. Preparations for the postponed Cop26 climate summit, to be held in Glasgow, are the ideal way for Britain to take a lead in a global discussion. Boris Johnson should use the platform to frame UK policy proposals boldly in terms of their impact on people and the planet, not just the economy. More

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      Trump's public lands chief refuses to leave his post despite judge's order

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      A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal.William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.“I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.”Perry has served as director of the BLM since July 2019, when the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, temporarily authorized him to the post. The BLM manages 248m acres – or 10.5% of all land in the US, the most of any agency, mostly in 11 western states and Alaska. It manages public lands for conservation as well as livestock gazing and resource extraction, and critics say the Trump administration has prioritized the latter.President Trump formally proposed Pendley for the post in July 2020, but withdrew the nomination after congressional Democrats indicated unanimous opposition to his appointment, and some Republicans seemed unlikely to support him owing to his fringe views. Pendley has never been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM director.After Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, brought a case claiming that Pendley’s service was unconstitutional, US district judge Brian Morris ruled two weeks ago that Pendley had “served unlawfully” for the last 424 days, prohibited him from acting as director and suggested that his decisions during his tenure be thrown out or reversed.The interior department said it would appeal against Judge Morris’s ruling.In response to Pendley refusing to vacate his post, the Montana senator Jon Tester accused him of a power grab “in service of his long-held goal of selling off our lands and enriching his corporate allies”.As a former industry attorney and longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a litigation organization funded by conservative and industry groups including the Charles Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, Pendley boasts a deep background of legal advocacy for extractive resource industries on public lands.He has made light of killing endangered species. The Guardian obtained a 2017 recording in which he told a group of North Carolina rightwing activists, “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property.”Congressional Democrats also expressed concern with his views on social justice and racial inequality. Pendley has mocked Native American land management practices and dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as based on a “lie”. More

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      Trump has made fracking an election issue. Has he misjudged Pennsylvania?

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      In early August, Ginny Kerslake’s lush green yard in a middle-class Pennsylvania suburb turned into a muddy river, thanks to another spill at the pipeline drilling site opposite her house. A couple of days later, 10,000 gallons of drilling mud, or bentonite clay, contaminated a popular recreational lake that also provides drinking water for residents of Chester county.The spills are down to construction of the Mariner East (ME) pipelines – a beleaguered multibillion-dollar project to transport highly volatile liquids extracted by fracking gas shale fields in western Pennsylvania to an export facility in Delaware county in the east, ready to ship to Europe to manufacture plastics.In Pennsylvania, four years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes to win the state, the controversial pipeline project has helped make fracking a political flashpoint in the debate over energy, the climate crisis, environmental inequalities and the influence of big business.Fracking was a hot topic in this week’s vice-presidential debate, and the Republican party has blanketed the state with ads falsely claiming a Biden administration would ban the practice. Kerslake was unimpressed by the debate, but like many local anti-fracking voters she is hopeful that a Democratic administration might, at least, be persuadable on the issue.“The direct impact in our township has opened our eyes to how elected officials and government agencies we expect to protect us but don’t … Without fracking, there are no pipelines and vice versa,” said Kerslake, speaking in front of the noisy, unsightly drilling site, which can operate from 7am to 7pm six days a week.The ME horizontal directional drilling (HDD) project – which is subject to multiple criminal and regulatory investigations – has caused major disruption to dozens of suburban and rural communities, contaminated surface and groundwater sources in hundreds of mud spills, and created countless sinkholes in parks, roads and yards since construction began in early 2017.At least 105,000 people live within a half-mile blast radius of the ME pipeline system, which carries highly flammable, odourless and colourlessgases in liquified form; many more Pennsylvanians attend schools, libraries and workplaces in close proximity.Pennsylvanians suffer the country’s second-worst air quality, thanks to greenhouse-gas-emitting industries, and according to one recent poll, 83% of voters in the state think climate change is a serious problem and 58% look unfavourably at lawmakers who oppose strong action to combat it. More

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      India’s New Agricultural Policy After Decades of Farmer Suffering

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      In India, June 5 was a turning point in the history of the country’s agriculture. The government passed three ordinances to unshackle farmers from the restrictive marketing regime that has managed the marketing of agriculture produce for decades. This sweeping stroke promises to bring the entire world of farming technology, post-harvest management and marketing channels at the doorstep of the farmer. The challenge now is to put these promises into action. The national vision of the farm sector is to double the income of farmers by 2022. This move is revolutionary since income is intrinsically linked to how the markets of the harvested produce function.

      First, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance provides much-awaited freedom of choice to farmers and traders. Now, farmers can sell and purchase produce through trading platforms other than the notorious markets operated by the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC). An article published on Fair Observer in 2019 rightly observed how forcing farmers to sell their produce to APMC markets led to the problem of monopsony. As the only buyer of produce, APMC markets faced no competition and offered farmers very low prices. This ordinance promises to increase farmer incomes significantly.

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      Second, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance further empowers farmers by creating a framework for direct engagement with processors, agri-business firms and large retailers.

      Finally, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance releases farm produce from the restrictions imposed by the Essential Commodities Act by severely curtailing regulations on farm produce. Such restrictions will now be permissible only under extremely emergent circumstances.

      The trigger for these sweeping changes may have been the disruption in the production and supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The health crisis and the resulting nationwide lockdown necessitated drastic steps to provide immediate relief to the agriculture sector. However, we must not forget that agricultural marketing reforms have been in public discourse for nearly two decades. In practice, they always appeared to take two steps backward for every step taken forward. Petty politics, instead of agricultural needs, dominated these decisions. Hence the officials of the Ministry of Agriculture deserve recognition. They have used a crisis as an opportunity to free farmers from the oppressive yoke of red tape, rigged markets and little choice.

      Poor Infrastructure, Corruption and Lack of Accessibility

      Before discussing the details of the three ordinances, let us briefly review the existing structure and context of the marketing of agriculture produce. The overarching legislations governing agricultural markets are the APMC acts of the respective Indian states. These were enacted with the laudable objectives of ensuring fair prices to farmers and safeguarding them from the exploitation of middlemen. They aimed to enable farmers to sell their produce easily.

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      These acts created the institution of the APMC, which operates agricultural markets commonly called APMC mandis, the Indian word for a market. Ironically, the APMCs have achieved the precise opposite of what their architects envisaged. In their enthusiasm to ensure stability, most state governments discouraged the rise of private mandis and even criminalized setting up competing markets. This created monstrous monopolies of APMC mandis controlled by influential cartels. Instead of offering fair prices to farmers, these mandis artificially manipulated prices. The management of APMC mandis remained opaque and exploited farmers while claiming to serve them. In particular, small and marginal farmers were at the mercy of wealthy traders at these markets.

      Unsurprisingly, the January 2019 report of the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture noted that the APMC acts had not achieved their purpose. With cartels at APMC mandis dictating the terms of trade, farmers face unreasonable deductions from the sale returns of their produce in the form of market fees, commission charges and other levies that rightfully should be paid by traders. On occasions, these farmers are charged the same fees multiple times. Corruption is rampant. Aside from a handful of exceptions, mandis tend to have poor infrastructure. Basic facilities for post-harvest management of agricultural produce such as grading, sorting and packaging are lacking. Supporting services, such as banks, post offices and resting places, have also failed to develop. If some facilities exist in some mandis, they are of extremely poor quality.

      Additionally, the number of such markets is grossly inadequate. The National Commission on Farmers has recommended that an agriculture market should serve a geographical area of not more than 80 square kilometers, whereas the existing national average is 496 square kilometers. Both the quantity and quality of APMC mandis are lacking. It’s tragic that an institution established to protect farmers from exploitation has become the source of it. It is for this reason that the parliamentary report recommended that creating alternative marketing platforms should be a priority. It observed that the APMC acts had led to restrictive markets and obstructed the emergence of competitive markets. Regrettably, the Indian farmer did not have the right to choose his customer thanks to the APMC acts.

      The APMC mandis tend to be noisy, messy, chaotic and unhygienic. So, it is no surprise that a large number of farmers, especially the small and marginal ones, do not sell to APMC mandis, but they do to intermediaries and unlicensed traders. Though there are no official figures available, various studies place the share of these informal intermediaries or middlemen at 30-55%. The figure is lower in the case of food grains but very high for horticulture produce.

      There exist, in many places, several layers between the farmers and the mandis. Thus, the safety net that these mandis aim to provide farmers is already diluted. The much-maligned middleman has become an integral part of the agriculture marketing system. One of the most significant aspects of the three ordinances promulgated on June 5 is to recognize and integrate these middlemen into a liberalized regulatory framework. Now, they can enter into bona fide trade relations with farmers.

      A New, Better Approach

      In 2003, the Ministry of Agriculture attempted reform after prolonged discussions. It came out with a model legislation for states to emulate: the APMC Marketing (Development and Regulation) Act, 2003. Curiously, the focus here also remained on regulation; the preamble mentions “improved regulation in marketing” before it talks of the “development of an efficient marketing system.” In contrast, the recent ordinances offer a pleasant contrast. The term “regulation” itself has been done away with. The first ordinance declares its objective to be “promotion and facilitation” and the second one “empowerment and protection.” These ordinances present a paradigm shift in Indian agricultural policy.

      The key objectives and their provisions in the trade and commerce ordinance are as follows:

      creation of an ecosystem of freedom of choice to farmers and traders for sale and purchase of farmers’ produce
      formation of competitive alternative trading channels
      promotion of transparent and barrier-free intra-state trade and inter-state trade
      facilitation of trade of produce outside the physical premises of notified markets
      creation of viable electronic trading platforms

      As per the new ordinances, farmers are to be paid on the day of the transaction or within a maximum of three working days. They do away with the onerous licensing system that required farmers to obtain several licenses to trade in different mandis within the same state. Gone is the market fee in the “trading area,” which is defined as any area of transaction outside the present day-notified mandi.

      Now, APMC mandis will now face serious competition and might be spurred into reforming themselves. Further, to the great relief of farmers, the dispute resolution mechanism has been kept simple and local, with preference being accorded to resolution through conciliation. The ordinance also envisages a price information and market intelligence system, thus equipping farmers for determining the price of their produce.

      The key features of the price assurance and farm services ordinance are as follows:

      creation of a national framework on farming agreements
      protection and empowerment of farmers in their engagement with the likes of large agribusiness firms, wholesalers and large retailers
      promotion of remunerative price agreements and a fair and transparent framework

      The ordinance also recognizes the possibility of an adverse impact on the rights of sharecroppers in the changed business environment. Hence, it has a specific provision for protecting their rights. The risk of markets and prices is likely to be transferred from the farmers to the contracting entities. Finally, the essential commodities ordinance clearly states, “the regulatory system needs to be liberalized … for the purpose of increasing the competitiveness in the agriculture sector and enhancing the income of farmers.” Accordingly, regulation of farm produce such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, onions and potatoes is only possible in extraordinary circumstances such as war, famine, a natural calamity of grave nature or an extraordinary price rise.

      Ensuring Lasting Change

      The reforms in agriculture marketing by way of these three ordinances are holistic. A primary problem with earlier legislation was that farmers could only sell their produce to specified traders in particular locations. As a result, farmers have been inevitably pushed to alternative buyers outside the legal framework, including middlemen and direct buyers. Small and marginal farmers suffer from an inherent disadvantage in such an environment. They lack access to market information. Even when they have some information, they lack the capital and technology that high-value crops require. The liberalization of agricultural markets will increase revenue avenues for farmers and improve their monetary returns.

      The proof of the pudding is in eating. The success of the ordinances will be determined by their implementation, which must be carried out in letter and spirit. While the ordinances remove aberrations and deficiencies in the regulatory structure, achieving their goals requires a strengthening of institutional capacity and infrastructure. Investment in agriculture, post-harvest infrastructure and marketing framework are all grossly inadequate. While these reforms should spur investment, it would be premature to expect that to happen automatically. Further efforts and interventions are called for. The big challenge ahead is to implement these reforms in the incredibly diverse markets across the country and to build strong alternatives as envisaged by the new legislation.

      A seemingly unrelated point is important regarding these ordinances. A recent article criticized the bureaucracy for drafting documents in language that was “officialese or bureaucratese.” This pejorative term is used for language full of jargon that is wordy and vague. Such criticism cannot be leveled against these ordinances. They serve as exemplars for other official documents. They are simple, straightforward and eminently understandable. The philosophy, intention and objectives of the ordinances are effectively spelled out in the preambles, which are among the best-drafted government documents in recent times. The trick now lies in achieving what they say.

      *[The author is a former secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying for the Indian government.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says one of the world's top climate scientists

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      This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of 400-plus news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The Guardian is the lead partner of CCN.Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be “essentially impossible” if Donald Trump is re-elected.A professor at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this year he declared: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”, a statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now.“If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit,” Mann said. “Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”None of Mann’s 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called “hockey stick study”, which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years. Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged abruptly upwards in about 1950 – represented by the blade of the stick – to make the 1990s the warmest decade in “at least the last millennium”.In 1999, Mann became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he was targeted by the climate denier crowd, an experience detailed in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. He received death threats, he says, and had emails stolen. Virginia’s former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-right Republican, subpoenaed documents related to Mann’s research funding in an effort to prove fraud. A Washington Post editorial blasted Cuccinelli for “mis[using] state funds in his own personal war against climate science”. In 2014, affirming a lower court’s decision, the supreme court of Virginia ruled against Cuccinelli, who now serves as a top official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.Mann denies that it’s a partisan statement to say that four more years of Trump would mean “game over” for the climate. More