Mother Earth, Greenpeace & Agrofuels: On Monday 12th October 2009 I came to London for a protest over the threat of agrofuels both to the native Latin American people and to the planet. Later there was a protest against the UK subsidising power stations that use agrofuels and research into agrofuels for aviation which would enable that industry to continue to hugely pollute. Going home from Westminster I photographed protesters who were still on the roofs of the Houses of Parliament protesting against the failure to act on climate change.
London Mobilisation for Mother Earth
Embassies of Colombia, Peru & Spain
The Global Mobilisation for Mother Earth, an international day in support of the struggles of Latin American native people and to protest against the increasing threat of agrofuels, was called by the Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indigenas on the day celebrated as a public holiday in the USA as Columbus Day, though it has other names in some South American Countries. It marks the day Columbus landed on Abya Yala (the Americas) in 1492.
The London protest was organised by the Coordinadora Latino-Americana which unites a number of Latin American solidarity groups in support of peoples along the Andes in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru who were marching against the European Union’s Free Trade agreements with Latin American countries. These will allow multinational companies to exploit resources on favourable terms, with deals by Colombia and Peru that will destroy the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous peoples. Former EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and his replacement Cathy Ashton, had played a leading role in these agreements.
The UK government was diverting large amounts of funding meant for renewable energy projects to the use of agrofuels which worsen global warming and threaten food security around the world.
Large areas of land in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South is being taken over by multinationals for agrofuel production, displacing the inhabitants, and introducing monoculture that destroys biodiversity and rapidly exhausts the soil. Large areas of irreplaceable ancient forests are also being felled mainly to grow these crops, but also as timber and to burn in power stations.
After a protest with speeches relevant to Colombia outside their embassy and the delivery of a letter there, the protesters walked on the the Peruvian Embassy, where we listened to a clear exposition of the link between opposition to agro-fuels and the indigenous struggles in Peru by eco-socialist Derek Wall of Green Left. Another letter was handed on and we moved on to the Spanish Embassy for a further protest. I left them there to go to the protest at the Department for Energy and Climate Change.
Agrofuels Don’t ROC(K)
Whitehall
Around a hundred protesters turned up for a demonstration at the DECC in London calling for an end to government subsidies for agrofuels because of their serious harm to communities and ecosystems and contribution to climate change.
The UK Government is diverting renewable energy subsidies (Renewable Obligations Certificates – ROCs) to subsidise power stations that use ‘agrofuels’. Fuel produced from palm oil was getting twice the subsidy that wind power would get to produce the same amount of energy. The hugely polluting wood-burning power station at Drax in Yorkshire was getting huge subsidies for its climate-wrecking activities.
Agrofuels were once seen as part of the solution to our environmental crisis, but we now know that they cause serious harm to the climate, wreck communities whose land is taken for their growth, destroy biodiversity, replace complex natural ecosystems by agrochemical based monoculture, and by replacing food crops, cause starvation.
Agrofuels allow industrial companies to continue ‘business as usual‘ and export their environmental problems to the non-industrial south, buying up land and creating ‘biofuel refugees‘ of indigenous peoples. A UN source has described this as a ‘crime against humanity.’
One of the speakers was John Stewart, who warned that the air transport industry sees agrofuels as their salvation, allowing them to continue offering cheap flights and increasing air traffic, while pretending to be green.
The protesters here were later joined by those who had been on the Mobilisation for Mother Earth protest against the the destructive alliance between multinational corporations and local elites in South America, particularly in mining and agrofuel production, and a speaker talked of their struggle for a dignified future for their children and their communities.
Greenpeace Parliament Roof Protest Ends
Houses of Parliament
I stopped on my way home as I walked past the Houses of Parliament amd took a couple of pictures. Around 20 Greenpeace protesters who had been on the roof since the previous evening were still there, although they came down shortly afterwards and were arrested.
They held bright yellow banners with the message ‘CHANGE THE POLITICS SAVE THE CLIMATE’ and called on the UK Government to take effective measures to combat climate change, including stopping airport expansion, a refocus of taxes on pollution, fair financing to help pay for low carbon.
Greenpeace say we have to change to green policies rather than simply mouth green rhetoric and listed 12 policies to save the climate and our planet and end the locking of the UK into high carbon lifestyles. They said “The International Energy Agency and leading economists agree that failure to act now will lead to economic as well as environmental disaster” and this is now increasingly becoming obvious.
Although the protest gained considerable media attention, almost all of this in the major news media was about the breach in security on the Parliamentary Estate and not about the much more vital issues raised by the protesters.
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