Climate change and transformation - we need science to address both

16 November 2015 - 12:49 By Bruce Gorton
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An image illustrating drought. File photo.
An image illustrating drought. File photo.
Image: Thinkstock Images.

Next year, I think we will see the figures on transformation in agriculture going backwards.

Transformation requires growth and economic strength. If a company issues shares to its workers in times of adversity, those workers will sell those shares. If you redistribute land during times of drought, the new farmers will sell those farms.

With the current drought we are going to see a lot of small and marginal farmers going under. In a lot of cases those farmers are going to be black.

White farmers tend to be more established, and thus have stronger capital backing. Further our economy is in part defined by the fact that white people tend to have more money – so as those marginal farmers sell up their land, you will find more of it ends up in white hands.

Even with the best efforts of government to finance those farmers, some are going to go under. It is not simply a matter of money, it is a matter of seeing the way forward.

The current drought was a predictable result of climate change, a topic we have been talking about for decades now. It is also something that is largely inevitable given the fact that much of the world is dominated by capitalist interests with less than no interest in the continued survival of our species.

Oil is big money, and the oil industry knew about climate change in the seventies.

According to Scientific American Exxon knew climate change was coming as early as 1977, but its answer was not to warn the world. Its answer was to sponsor groups to “sell doubt” and misinformation to the public.

Because the survival of the species is less important to Exxon or any of the other big oil companies than making more money now.

These companies may not have ethics, but they have the money to buy endless spin, and that spin means that nothing is going to get done about stopping climate change any time soon.  

We can bemoan the fact that America's right stood in the way of any International agreements on climate change, we can decry the evils of Australia voting for a climate denialist kook, and we can bemoan the rise of coal in China, while conveniently ignoring our own contributions to the current state of the global climate.

We can do all of that, but we cannot pretend the current state of the world is unpredicted, nor that the most likely outcome isn’t things getting worse.

We cannot control the world, we can only control how we respond to it.

Agriculture is only going to get more difficult, unless we do something to address the coming climate.

Our assumption must be that prevention is not going to happen, so we need to have a plan, we need to work on how to make agriculture work in the future.

And that means addressing the short-funding of our universities, and the short funding of our sciences. We don't simply need our students to address the skills shortage, but also to perform that other big function of a university - we need the research.

#Feesmustfall, and #sciencemustrise because more than anything else our farmers need information, and they need new crops to grow. Otherwise all of this talk about transformation is simply window dressing – all you'll end up with is more land on the market.

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