Rather than focus on the systemic changes needed to stop the profit-driven plunder of the earth’s resources through fossil fuel extraction and deforestation, the only proposals from the negotiators at the recent 2015 Paris Climate Conference are corporate-friendly, market-based solutions, charge two leading NGOs that work for small-scale fisheries and fishworkers.
In a Statement issued in Paris on 11 December 2015, at the end of the Conference of Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) and the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF), said that these so-called solutions are designed to not conflict with corporate interests and corporate power but to strengthen them, by giving them more control over our natural resources.
The negotiators seem to believe that if we want to solve climate change, we have to give corporate interests a bigger say in how to govern nature in the process making climate change yet another tool to profit at the expense of people and the planet, the Statement noted.
The blue carbon’ concept, being pushed by an alliance of governments, environmental NGOs and the corporate sector, puts an economic value on wetland areas like mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows which can mitigate’ global carbon emissions through their natural abilities to capture and store carbon.
Far from solving the problem, this is a false solution that legitimizes the continued emissions and plunder of natural resources in one place as long as wetlands that store and absorb carbon somewhere else are protected, the Statement points out.
It goes on to add: Instead of these corporate-friendly false solutions, we, the small-scale fishers,
together with other small-scale food producers, have the socially and ecologically just visions and solutions to climate change. Our indigenous traditional knowledge and culture is an entire way of life that is about sustaining communities and nature, not about profit. This is also reflected in our engagement with the resources through fishery practices, both inland and in the oceans.
The Statement also makes reference to the FAO’s Small-scale Fisheries Guidelines which point out that small-scale fishers use non-industrialised methods of harvesting (passive or manually hauled gear) which have a low impact on the ecosystem, are energy-efficient and have a low carbon footprint.
As the true guardians of the fisheries resources, we should be given back control of the water bodies, so as to ensure that fisher peoples manage their own resources for the benefit of people and the planet not profit, the Statement demands.
It ends with this call: We will continue the fight to achieve our real solutions and in this struggle,
women and youth lead the way forward and sustain the movement. For too long, social movements have been divided through our engagement in different struggles. It is time for us from the local to the international scale to converge. For us, this starts with the demand for food sovereignty and climate justice.
The full text of the Statement is available at:
http://worldfishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The_Global_Ocean_Grab-
EN.pdf