We are still getting over the tragic occurrence that has taken place in Mumbai. These floods have been unprecedented and you know the amount of misery and the amount of loss -- both of life and property -- that has taken place through parts of Maharashtra, symbolised in the most concentrated manner with what has happened in the city of Mumbai.
Now, as chairman of the India government panel on climate change, I do think we discern about the pace at which climate change is taking place and I certainly don’t want to link any single event with the process of human-induced climate change but it’s a fact that extreme events -- their occurrence, their frequency and their severity -- is on the increase. It’s also a fact that the third successive report of the ICC, the India government panel on climate change, clearly highlighted the likely impacts that climate change would have on the Indian monsoon, and it elaborated on this finding by saying that we would probably see much greater precipitation but perhaps over short periods of time. And the entire pattern of monsoons that is taking place and has really nurtured life in the subcontinent is going to be disturbed as a result of climate change. I am just making this statement and I come to the basic causes or reasons for the climate change and what we might really do about it and why this is so important for peace on this planet.
Let me give you another scenario, a horrifying scenario, if I may, of what would happen. We have seen the tragedy that the world has suffered -- particularly the Asia, the Southeast Asia and Asian region part the Indian ocean region where the tsunami disaster took place on 26th of December last year.
Now, one of the impacts of climate change is the steady increase and rise of the sea level. Suppose a similar tsunami was to take place in the year 2050 -- or let us say 2080 -- and by then the sea level was a foot and a half higher, can you imagine the extent of destruction that would take place? We are also fortunate that the tsunami that took place the last time around did not really impact on Bangladesh. As you know a large area of Bangladesh is extremely low lying and if the seas had rolled over that land you can imagine the enormous destruction that would have been it would have been mind boggling. Our projections for increasing sea level before the end of this century are within the range of 9 cm to 88 cm. Now 88 cm is pretty close to a metre and you know that most of the Maldive islands lie between the height of a metre of 2 metres above sea level. So that’s one country that is clearly in danger of being wiped out when the sea level rises.
And where would all the human beings who live over there go if something were to happen on that scale. Even with the tsunami that took place in December, the island of Male was completely inundated by the sea but what protected it was a structure that had been constructed essentially to protect this particular island from sea level rise and the result was that even though Male was inundated by the sea and most of the houses -- all the houses -- were under water, the fact is that the fury of the sea was ruined by these protective walls that had been constructed around the island and the result the loss of life and property was relatively low.
But can all the small island states of the world set up similar structures? Where is the money? I mean, these are some of the poorest nations on earth and how are they going to be able to handle, and how are they going to be able to adapt to the fury of the climate change when it is manifested in the form of sea level rise?
We are also creating a situation where water wars that people have written about -- I mean, in the last century, this was a very familiar line that you read everywhere, that the next wars of the world are going to take place over water. Of course no one thought about it after that point of time. But the basic fact is that the entire water regime throughout the world is going to be disturbed.
We see in our own country that the Himalayan glaciers are retreating rather rapidly. Recently there was a BBC documentary, a BBC show, on this when the producer went all the way up to Gangotri and you can see on the basis of evidence which people can provide you on the spot that all the glaciers in the world are rapidly retreating.
I myself was in the northern part of Norway six weeks ago -- in the arctic region of Norway -- and an interesting fact that came to light over there was that polar bears, the female of the polar bear on average now weighs 40 kilograms lighter, is much smaller and lighter than it used to be say 50 years ago. Why? Simply because polar bears feed on seals, and seals are moving elsewhere because of the change in climate that is taking place. This is only one example of how human actions can disturb the ecology of this planet. If you look at the bio diversity all over this planet, we have documented that there is a growing and real threat to bio diversity across this world.
Now, having said so, let me focus on the essence of what I am trying to put across. The whole paradigm of development that we have followed, which is based on consumerism, has created this problem. And the pity of it is, country after country, and society after society, follows it blindly without understanding the relationship between cause and effect. Now, Dr Ikeda has very clearly pointed out the importance of oneness, the importance of inter-relationship between everything on this planet, and we know if we pursue this path or this paradigm of so-called development, then we are certainly going to complicate the future. Not only for our children but I would say even for ourselves, because some of these changes have started haunting us already.
So what I would like to submit is that Gandhiji’s concept of ahimsa was not limited only to violence against human beings. Ahimsa has as much to do with violence against nature as it has to do with nature against human beings, and very often we are doing it subconsciously -- it’s not as if everybody is trying to destroy the bounty of nature through some aggressive design. This is happening, essentially, in a very subconscious -- a very unthinking way.
You all would recall when Gandhiji was asked by a particular British reporter, “Mr Gandhi, wouldn’t you want India to reach the same level of prosperity that Britain has attained?”, his answer, which was very simple but at the same time profound, clearly said, he said, “Well it took Britain conquering half this planet to reach its level of affluence. How many planets would India have to conquer to reach the same prosperity?”
So, you know, the whole concept of prosperity -- imposing costs on other elements of society, other parts of the globe, just so that we are able to pursue our very narrow consumerist values and tendencies, is, in some form, violence. I mean, it is a violation of ahimsa, and this is something we really need to worry about. WWF International puts out a publication each year in which it charts out what is known as an ecological footprint of different societies, and this essentially means living beyond your means. It essentially means a society which is going beyond the sustainable use of resources that it has access to and, therefore, the destruction of resources elsewhere in the world. And if you look at their progressive publications which compute this ecological footprint, you find that there is reason to be disturbed. We are clearly on a path where we are becoming more and more insensitive to the effect of our actions particularly on Mother Nature and the bounty that our forefathers, our ancestors, have lived and have been able to thrive on, and have been able to give us today.
So I think we are at a moment where we necessarily have to start worrying about the pattern of development that society like India in particularly must look at very consciously, and must review, so that we don’t follow blindly what has been established by the prosperous species of them all. And this is as much an issue that involves pragmatism as it involves philosophy. I mean, philosophy, in some sense, is an aggregation of pragmatism. The only thing is, those who are pragmatic look at the narrow and measurable universe around them and they look at a time frame which is easily visualised, and they don’t go beyond. Philosophy, if it has a logical and an ethical basis, clearly expands these boundaries much further, and it is therefore able to visualise and articulate what would happen beyond the narrow confines that we live in that we are concerned with, and what would happen over a period of time that perhaps we are not capable of clearly understanding, much less forecasting.
But talking about pragmatism, what is happening to food security on the planet? Between 1950 to 1996, the stocks of food grains in the world and this was a period of very steady prosperity, larger and larger outputs of food grains all over the world, including societies which had suffered famine previously -- China and India included -- but then what happened was, between 1996 and 2003, food output throughout the world remained static, there was no increase whatsoever and all the stocks that we had accumulated were more or less used up. In 2004, because of good rainfall, much higher prices of food grains, we found that output rebounded and, as a result, about 100 million tonnes -- 124 million tonnes to be precise -- were added to the previous year’s food output.
So things look much better. But it is important to understand what’s happening in the certain parts of the world which is obviously going to place a huge demand on food grain reserves in the future. And I’d like to highlight the problem of China. Now, China’s grain production which reached a peak of 392 million tonnes in 1998 dropped to 430 million tonnes in 2003. So this means this was a drop of 70 million tonnes, which, incidentally, is larger than the total food output of Canada. Now in the case of China and several other parts of the world, demand for food grains is growing so rapidly and the ability to meet that demand is remaining static and in some cases actually declining, with the result that the whole issue of food security acquires enormous importance.
What would this do to peace? It would be a severe threat to peace throughout the world. You’ve seen scenes of the famine that’s taking place in Niger right now on our television screens -- it’s a heart-rending picture, when you have children who have been emaciated to the level that they look smaller than infants and you see adults going across vast expanses of land just to be able to pick up a few twigs and pieces of greenery that they can eat. So all of this to a large extent is going to be impacted unfavourably by climate change and several other factors that are forcing a reduction and degradation of natural resources across the world.
I want to quote to you the 2004 report of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. We have a convention to combat desertification because desertification is a serious threat in several parts of the world, including this country and China. And, of course, sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps one of the worst hit by this trend. And this report says that since 1990 it is estimated that some 6 million hectares of productive land have been lost every year due to land degradation. This, in turn, has caused income losses worldwide of US$ 42 billion per day, yet the costs associated with inaction in regards to desertification are estimated at 115 per cent of developing countries’ GDP. In most cases investment in combating desertification is one order of a magnitude below this amount.
So you know this raises questions about the priorities that we have. We certainly produce fancier and fancier cars. We produce all kinds of luxuries which take up billions and trillions of dollars, but here is a serious human crisis, here is a serious human challenge which just does not get the attention that it deserves. And all of this at some point of time is bound to visit us. It is bound to visit our children and our grandchildren because there is just no place on earth where we can hide if crisis strikes any other part of this planet. So I think this is the message that we need to understand and I would like to submit that the ecological and environmental refugees are going to be a reality unless the human race wakes up and if we have ecological and environmental refugees not just in a few hundreds and thousands, but in hundreds of millions, then that is clearly going to be a very serious threat to peace and security throughout the world.
I want to also highlight the enormous disparities that are expanding in income levels throughout the world. I’ve a great deal of respect for Kenneth Boulding, one of the brightest and most sensitive economists of the 20th century who I had the pleasure of talking to on occasion. He said it is doubtful whether 200 years ago the richest country had a per capita real income more than five times that of the poorest. So this was the world 200 years ago which was not all that diverse in terms of income and wealth. Today, and Boulding is writing this sometime in the 1980s, since then things have become much worse. Today, the difference between per capita income for the richest countries and for the poorest is of the order of 1:50 rather than 1:5.
So we cannot possibly accept this frightening reality of growing disparities round the world, because some of these are also going to be exacerbated by our actions that destroy Nature and the bounty of Nature, climate change being one of them. There is a large part of the earth where droughts are taking place with greater frequency and with much worse severity, and all of these are regions essentially that are some of the poorest in the world. And clearly these communities would be afflicted to an extent where the global community cannot remain immune to at least carry out emergency measures which incidentally are far more expensive than preventive measures, but those preventive measures will be put in place only if we understand the impact of our actions, only if we understand what we are doing to the ecological balance of this planet. So I would submit that there is need for taking some very basic decisions on how we are going to live our lives, how we are going to perceive the very path of development, or so-called development, and I would submit, as Mahatma Gandhi said, Be the change you want to see in the world. Each one of us has to start making something very minor, something very small, by which we ensure that we don’t fall into this blinded world of excessive consumerism, totally insensitive attitude to what is happening to the rest of society.
And I end by giving you one set of numbers which may you think -- and between 1950 and now, the world meat production has gone up from 44 million to 253 million tonnes. This is a huge, stupendous increase. Worldwide average consumption is 41 kilograms of meat per person, which is double the figure half a century ago. The current trend of animal feed consisting of food grains if changed could make a difference, and the example that it gives is of the US where for instance about four-fifths of the grain is essentially for producing meat. If the total level of grain consumed was to be brought down from 800 kilograms per capita to 700 kilograms per capita, there would be significant health benefits for a large number of people who are hooked on to excessive consumption of meat, and total grain consumption would go down by 30 million tonnes -- enough to feed 150 million persons in low-income countries.
There’s a very interesting organisation in San Francisco called Redefining Progress -- if you get a chance visit their website -- and they compute each year what they call the genuine indicator of progress, and they arrive at it by assessing how many people in the US -- since they are focusing on the US -- overeat, they become obese. All the excessive food that they consume goes into computation of the GDP of the country. Then these guys go into all kinds of diet restriction programmes and slimming programmes, that’s the service that they pay for, that also gets added to the GDP of the country, and in the end if you look at the whole range of such activities, you know it almost seems as though we are on a self-defeating path of consumerism.
And as a result we are living in an illusion where we believe that they are better off -- we certainly are better off in several respects. I switched off my mobile phone but even though it’s a nuisance, at times when we need it, it’s a great facility that I think technology has given us. But a large number of things that we do today blindly ape what has been established in the countries of the north that doesn’t necessarily increase human welfare and it’s certainly a threat to peace and will be a threat to peace in the years to come.
So I’m sorry if what I have said is perhaps very different from what a philosopher would have told you, but I’ve tried to convert the message of peace into something that’s very practical, something that has a scientific basis, and I thank you for this opportunity. |
