Thursday, July 17, 2008

Beggaring your Neighbour

The one gross global behavior of the developed and even the developing world has been the persistent rigging of so called free markets to the disadvantage of the powerless. The practice was never condoned internally, yet is blightly applied to them foreigners without a wince.

The massive agricultural subsidy systems deployed in both the USA and Europe are too well documented to bear much further comment. That the same practices spring up again and again everywhere is an offense against the economic nature of the human condition and certainly perpetuates global poverty by actually removing volatility and opportunity from the affected populations.

The only relief from this nonsense has been the drawing down of this rural impoverished population into manufacturing work. This process will be complete worldwide over the next generation.

This rant is inspired by the amazing nonsense of the rules imposed on the European carbon credit system. Once again these cash transfers are kept within the internal currency regime lest any of it leak out into the foreign woodlands where it may do some good.

A fraction of the money envisaged is ample to halt the process of deforestation worldwide. It is also that easy.

My point is that we have a creditable universal human need to globalize our response to loading the atmosphere with CO2 and to properly globalize through free and at most fairly managed trade the global economy. Yet everywhere we turn, some weasel will try to rig the game.

When that happens the unempowered are sacrificed and their economic potential diminished. What communism did for a third of the world’s population, this behavior continues to do for the last third.

It also gives us no credibility when we sit down with the local strongman and chisel on the pittance we pay for some of his people’s production that he has commandeered.

Do you not think that everyone would sit up and take notice if a foreign government agency stepped up to the plate and purchased all the vulnerable forest lands in Brazil? Do you not also think that the Brazilian Government would feel empowered to actually establish improved forest management in concert with these new citizen agencies?

What many do not realize is that the acquisition of a major resource is normally looked on favorably by developing countries simply because much better practice is also imported as a matter of course. No Canadian mining company will ever dump cyanide into a river, yet next door hundreds of artisan miners are dumping mercury and paying no taxes. Governments have learned this.

Right now a simple decision to allow the carbon credit system to be applied globally to sustain forests everywhere will swiftly create a lively market for forest lands and eventually demand for forest improvement itself. It really is that easy and the cheapest way to get started.

Today, there is almost no place left that such a program would be resisted by the local thug. We are not talking about farmland here. We are talking about both untouched forest and the local forest commons that is been continuously damaged all of which is easily settled.

Once this global economic protocol is established worldwide it is simplicity itself to extend the credit system to support the production of biochar. We even have boots on the ground and a natural auditing system in place. By the way, recall that biochar is produced from non woody plant material and is not predominantly charcoal which is produced from wood. This eliminates the necessary grinding cycle and other related difficulties.

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