Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low Carbon Agriculture

Abstract

Most trade union approaches to climate change focus on the push for ‘green jobs’ and the need to secure rights for workers employed in industries/sectors that would necessarily be phased out as well as rights for workers in the newly created, climate-friendly jobs (‘just transition’). The shortcomings of this approach are two-fold. First, it can underestimatethe extent to which current technologies are embedded in power relations that require more than rational arguments to transform. Technology is never socially neutral. Casual talk of a ‘Green New Deal’ obscures the extent to which the Rooseveltian New Deal was a response to an unprecedented social collapse, financed through massive public investment. Market mechanisms won’t deliver what we need – global warming is the definitive ‘market failure’ – and pressure from financial markets following the global financial meltdown has led governments to attack public expenditure, including various subsidies and supports for alternative energy. Second, the ‘just transition’ approach tends to overlook that rights are never granted, but always fought for. A different approach to the global food system and its pre-eminent role inheating the planet indicates a path to a more climate-friendly system of food production through food workers’ own struggle for their rights. Approaching the issues in this way establishes workers’ struggles as a key vector for changing the food sector’s environmental footprint, rather than seeing workers as passive suppliants at the end of a hypothetical transition in which they have played no role. From this perspective, the transition is embodied in and propelled by the struggle for trade union rights; the movement itself is a constituting element in the transition. The global food system today is in permanent, deepening crisis, the matrixat the intersection of the global hunger, climate and water crises. Crisis is an overused word, and is employed here in the strictly medical sense, as a condition threatening the survival of the organism. An estimated 1.2 billion people are malnourished and hungry. Subsidised overproduction feeds the destruction of local and national food-producing systems. Our food system is addicted to diminishing sources of increasingly costly fossil fuels, depleting and destroying water and topsoil through production methods that contribute massively to global warming through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while failing itsWhile until recently much of the discussion on food and global warmingfocused on transport (‘food miles’), the food system’s largest contribution to GHG production occurs before food leaves the farm gate. According to the Stern Review (2006) (and other studies report similarresults), agriculture and land use (principally agriculture and forestry) jointly account for 32 per cent of GHG emissions – greater by far than any other single industry or sector (the Stern Review puts industry and transport at 14 per cent each – and products for agriculture like fertilizers and pesticides fall under industry in this report). If one includes processing, transport, packaging, waste, etc., the food system is responsible from 40 to as much as 57 per cent of all GHG. According to the Stern Review (Annex 7.g Emissions from the agriculturesector):Fertilisers are the largest single source (38%) of emissions from agriculture. Agricultural emissions are expected to rise almost 30% in the period to 2020 … Around half of the projected growth in emissions is expected to come from the use of fertiliser on agricultural soils. Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent a GHG than carbon dioxide.