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Livelihoods/Rights

Riber Hansson

Study: Climate change takes from the poor, gives to the rich

17th April 2016

A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world’s wealthiest countries. Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth’s poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities….

The gathering storm of climate migration

16th April 2016

Michael Igo writes: Since 2008, 22.5 million people have been forced from their homes due to floods and hurricanes, twice as many as the record 11 million displaced by conflict in 2014… As global temperatures creep higher, and storms, droughts, floods, and heat waves grow more severe, we face a future of mass climate-related migration….

Video: Development and identity theft in Northeast India

Usha Dewani writes: Indigenous communities have a strong belief in the sacredness of the natural world and assert that excess exploitation of the material world through huge infrastructure programs like large dams and hydropower projects would not lead to social development. They are concerned that these infrastructure programmes might compromise their autonomy over their lands….

Is agriculture a business?

11th April 2016

Harish Damodaran writes: Is farming really a business? If so, to what extent? Is there something about agriculture that makes it fundamentally different as a business? Farmers suffer rules other businessmen never encounter. There are at least four “laws” of business operating only in farming, of which the last two are probably unique to India….

Jungle Book: Tribes threatened with eviction as Disney movie opens

10th April 2016

As the new Jungle Book movie is released, tribes across India are being illegally evicted from their lands because they’ve been turned into tiger reserves. One of these places is the iconic Kanha Tiger Reserve, the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s original novel, from where hundreds of Baiga and Gond tribespeople were illegally evicted in 2014….

Video: Cowism! How an engineer is transforming Indian agriculture

9th April 2016

Chetan Raut, founder of the intriguingly named startup Cowism, aims to empower distressed Maharashtra farmers to become self-reliant and financially independent by integrating commercially useful assets like native cattle into farming practices to improve soil fertility, lower input costs, and raise profits. “Invariably, the solutions to our problems lie right under our noses,” says Chetan….

Frans Lanting

An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’

Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….

The Hindu

India’s looming water wars can destroy everything, from Make in India to smart cities

8th April 2016

Nikhil Inamdar writes: India has the world’s largest number of people without access to clean water. The financial burden of this has fallen on its poorest agrarian communities, but the crisis is now spilling over to industries too. In Marathwada, the tanker business is the only one booming. The rest of the economy has collapsed….

A Green Development Manifesto for Kerala

7th April 2016

This first of its kind Green Development Agenda for Kerala was collectively drafted by green collective Paristhithi Aikya Vedhi, and has been submitted to the leaders of the main political parties in the fray for the upcoming Assembly Elections in May. It was released on 30th March by Dr.V.S.Vijayan, Member, Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel….

How Goa’s mining lobby, government and media ganged up against a young tribal activist

4th April 2016

Nandita Haksar writes: Ravindra Velip, a 27-year-old tribal activist fighting mining in Goa, is facing the combined might of the state government, the mining lobby and a complicit media. A founding member of green activist group Rainbow Warriors, he was arrested and placed in judicial custody. When he was assaulted in jail, it went unreported….

There’s a drought in many parts of India. Why isn’t it making headlines?

3rd April 2016

Harish Damodaran writes: In the past, droughts invariably fuelled speculation and hoarding by unscrupulous traders. But this time, Indians in the cities are hardly feeling the pinch. Barring sugar, consumers aren’t paying all that much more compared to a year ago. Simply put, this time it is a drought essentially of farmers and rural producers….

Special: A look back at Kerala’s endosulphan disaster

2nd April 2016

Valiya Chirakula Pakshikal (Birds With Large Wings), directed by Dr. Biju, has been declared 2015’s Best Film on Environment. It explores the disastrous environmental and public health consequences of pesticide use, based on real-life events in Kasargode, Kerala. On this occasion, here’s a look back at the manmade disaster that continues to haunt Kasargode residents….

Some experts have attributed the unprecedented rainfall that led to the 2015 Chennai floods to climate change

The scientific challenge of attributing extreme weather events to human activity

28th March 2016

Roz Pidcock reports: Working out whether human activity is supercharging extreme events like floods, droughts and heatwaves, is one of the youngest branches of climate science. But it’s moving at breakneck pace. So much so, that the US National Academy of Sciences has fast-tracked a report taking stock of the science and where it’s heading….

Organic agriculture, agroecology and the parallel reality of the GMO evangelist

27th March 2016

Colin Todhunter writes: GMO enthusiasts insist that agroecological farming could never feed the world. But it has been feeding us all for millennia – and it’s the only way to continue while enriching the soils on which all farming depends. Gandhi once called industrial agriculture a nine-day wonder. And its time will soon be up….

How WeFarm connects small farmers without the Internet

25th March 2016

Pierce Nahigyan reports: Founded in 2014, WeFarm is a free, peer-to-peer service designed for farmers around the world. It enables farmers to share information with each other via SMS, or text messaging. WeFarm translates and connects queries from continent to continent, and has thus far provided more than 100,000 answers to its 43,000 registered farmers….

Video: Rice Bowl to Ashtray – Documentary on industrialisation and displacement in Chhattisgarh

22nd March 2016

Since its formation Chhattisgarh has become the new destination of domestic and foreign investment. Sunil Kumar’s award-winning documentary Daan Se Raakh (Rice Bowl to Ashtray) captures displacement and industrialization in Chhattisgarh. It critically investigates the impact of unbridled industrialization, privatization of water, and acquisition of agricultural land on the life and livelihoods of the rural population….

25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans

AFP

Farmer suicides: What do we know? What does it mean?

21st March 2016

As output is rising at a slower rate since 1990, profitability of farmers is getting adversely affected: for they are not being able to produce at as fast a rate as they had been doing before. Note, decline in public investment is a conscious government decision. There are also other policy changes which aggravated this….

On burning ground: The human cost of India’s push to produce more coal

20th March 2016

Fred Pearce reports: As part of India’s modernization program, Prime Minister Narenda Modi has called for doubling the nation’s coal production by 2020. If it moves forward, India seems set to create a mounting tide of victims — from the cycle-wallahs and refugees of Jharia’s coal fires, to the country’s air quality, to the planet’s climate….

Ratan Tata at the Bangalore Aero Show, 2013. The Tata Group is a major player in both mining and defence manufacturing.

India’s rising Corporate-Military Complex: A critical appraisal

15th March 2016

Rahul Varman writes: Bauxite or iron mines are opened up by grabbing people’s lands and homes against great resistance, and UAVs and other increasingly sophisticated weapons are used to quell this resistance. The corporate sector benefits both from the mining, as well as the demand for weapons, demand which is independent of the vagaries of the market system….

Shutterstock

CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature

13th March 2016

Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….