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The Right to Development: Global South Responses to Climate Chaos

In the face of catastrophic climate change, while governments are lagging behind and the Kyoto Protocol proposes insufficient emissions restrictions, it is social movements in the Global South that are taking the lead, making the boldest proposals, and shaping a new vision of large-scale social change. While we in the North find our policy makers bound by the need to reduce carbon footprints incrementally through carbon trading, a revival of nuclear energy, and other technocratic solutions which essentially rob from Peter to pay Paul, the countries of the South are witnessing large scale social mobilizations that see the havoc wrought by climate change not as a wholly new phenomenon, but as an exacerbation of conditions they've been living for decades under the ravages of resource-colonization.

Let's take it as a given that the grimmest scientific predictions for climate change are accurate and that, accordingly, we must cap global warming at 2 degrees Centigrade over the next century; similarly, let's recognize that in order to avoid enshrining current inequalities between North and South through strict caps on growth and emissions for all nations, developed and developing countries must undertake common but differentiated commitments.

Leapfrogging beyond petroleum-based development is now a necessity, as much due to skyrocketing oil prices as to skyrocketing heat waves, and academics and policy leaders in the developing world are coming to terms with this. But it is not merely changes in the industrial sector the way goods are produced and distributed that are required to address the manifold threat of climate change. The very ways that society is organized must be re-envisioned, and the social movements of the Global South are leading the charge.

Via Campesina, the largest international peasant movement the world has ever seen, with huge numbers of members throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa, draws the link clearly between climate change and crop failure, and between food sovereignty and climate justice. A 2007 declaration demanded:

1: The complete dismantling of agribusiness companies: they are stealing the land of small producers, producing junk food and creating environmental disasters.
2: The replacement of industrialized agriculture and animal production by small-scale sustainable agriculture supported by genuine agrarian reform programs.
3: The promotion of sane and sustainable

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