Note

Not By Dollars Alone
Bharat Dogra

The discussion in the 11th conference of Parties to the Convention on Bio-diversity was dominated to a large extent by the need to raise adequate funds for the worldwide effort to save various species and their habitats. As is becoming increasingly the norm at such international events, an agreement could be reached only after the negotiations on the last day of the Conference dragged on till midnight and beyond.

Finally developed countries agreed to double the fund flow to developing countries by 2015 for efforts to check the loss of biodiversity. The increase of fund will be calculated on the basis of a base-line which is the average of funding for bio-diversity during 2006-10.

The flow of funds is expected to favour particularly the least developed countries and small island nations, and help them as well as other countries to achieve the 20 goals known as the Aichi Targets which were adopted at the previous (2010) conference on bio-diversity in Japan.

The agreement reached in the last hours helped the proceedings to end on a positive note and enabled host India to heave a sigh of relief, even though some dissenting voices could be heard till the end.

There is no doubt that more funds are needed for saving bio-diversity particularly in the poorer countries. Hence the pressure that was exerted at the Hyderabad conference on developed countries to part with more funds was fully justified. In fact some of the projections of the costs of the huge task ahead for saving bio-diversity would suggest that even more funds will be needed and the bulk of this has to come from the richest countries.

Nevertheless, the heavy concentration on financial aspects led to at least relative neglect of issues relating to urgently needed policy change. Just as bigger budgets are necessary for saving bio-diversity these policy changes are also essential. As long as national policies which are harmful for bio-diversity are not changed, merely bigger budgets for saving bio-diversity cannot achieve the objective.

In the case of agriculture government policies in several countries including India continue to prioritise green revolution type monocultures whose spread over vast areas has contributed to the on-field loss of tens of thousands of crop-varieties during the last four or five decades. If this policy of the government is not changed then enormous government funds will continue to contribute to destruction of agricultural diversity. In such a situation access to more funds for saving bio-diversity can at best contribute to only the collection of bio-diversity in seed banks or germ-plasm banks, while on the field situation will continue to be dominated by monocultures.

This trend towards monocultures will increase further if the high-profile efforts of multinational seed companies and their subsidiaries to get more permission for GM crops succeed. Already it has been seen how the permission for Bt cotton led to on-the-field loss of cotton bio-diversity. The same can be repeated in the case of other crops if people are not careful enough to protect farmers and farming from those multinational seed companies whose ambition it is to dominate the world seed market and to do this using mainly their GM crop varieties. In several instances in the past the central and some state governments in India allowed their own policy making and programmes to come alarmingly close to these companies. This again emphasises how government policies have not been consistent with the objective of saving bio-diversity. This is true not just for India but for several other countries as well.

Similarly in the case of forestry the all-too-rapid clearances for cutting or destroying natural forests to make way for gigantic mining or infra-structure projects raise questions about the compatibility of government policies with the protection of biodiversity. The increase in green cover which the government shows is mainly on the basis of eucalyptus type of plantation which do not have any positive impact on biodiversity and may well have a negative impact in certain conditions. On the other hand natural forests are the invaluable habitat of very rich bio-diversity created over millions of years. To sacrifice such a wealth of bio-diversity for loot-and-scoot mining projects which at best will provide some economic gain for only a few years again conveys a very poor understanding of the importance of bio-diversity on the part of authorities. Such instances of sacrificing natural forests have been increasing in recent years.

On the positive side it has been revealed time and again in India as well as elsewhere that when people are mobilised effectively, great achievements of saving biodiversity can even be made without any big budgets. This is the lesson of people's environmental movements like chipko movement in the Himalayan region and the appiko movement in the Western Ghats region which made a very-significant contribution to saving forests and bio-diversity by mobilising local villagers. What they achieved (moratorium on felling of green trees over very vast areas) could not have been achieved even by many big budgets in the absence of enthusiastic involvement of people.

This is why it is extremely worrying that some internationally supported government policies for protecting bio-diversity are based not on involving people but on displacing people. In numerous national parks and other protected areas, it is being seen time and again that the government's efforts ultimately lead to the displacement of people. Such distortions will have to be corrected, and government policies should seek to involve people (particularly tribals and other villagers living in or near forests) instead of threatening them if the efforts to save forests and wild-life have to achieve significant success.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 37, Mar 24-30, 2013

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