South American Law & Policy » Uncategorized

UN Adopts Voluntary “Land Grab” Guidelines

fromherz — Sat, 12 May 2012 22:39:54 +0000

I’ll leave it to Rhodri Williams and the Terra Nullius crew to discuss this in detail, but SALP readers should find this news interesting as well. Although the “land grab” phenomenon — foreign investors buying up swaths of land, mainly for agricultural purposes — has been felt most severely in Africa and Asia, it’s surely happening in South America too.

-NF

P.S. I discussed this phenomenon briefly in my latest article on soil conservation and the preservation of agrarian culture. When poor and starving nations are selling or leasing their most productive farm land to foreign investors, the concept of food sovereignty becomes mighty interesting.

An Exercise for Students of International Law and Relations

fromherz — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:49:31 +0000

About three weeks ago, I began teaching a course on public international law at a university here in Cochabamba. It’s been a joy so far, but last class I began to notice that some of the students were less than fully engaged. So I decided it was time for an in-class exercise — something that would draw them into the material in a more active way. As it turned out, today’s topic — decision-making within the international community — was the perfect platform. I would ask the students to take on the role of a nation, and through this exercise demonstrate both the domestic and external tension inherent in decision-making on the international stage.

Rather than asking each student to play the role of a different country, I drew up only five country patterns for my fifteen students. Although this cut down on prep time, it also served a pedagogical purpose: With three students taking on the role of Brazil, three the role of the United States, three the role of Sudan, three the role of Afghanistan, and three the role of Greece, we came to see how a nation faces the difficulty of organizing itself internally before it even gets the chance to advance an international agenda.

Here’s how it worked: For each country, I set forth a series of challenges and opportunities, more or less based on reality. For example, in the case of Afghanistan, I described its history of foreign occupations, tribal conflicts, human-rights abuses, weak democracy, and so forth. Based on this fact pattern, I asked the student to rank the country’s international priorities from 1 to 10. The ten campaigns from which they could choose were as follows:

The fight against climate change
The fight against HIV/AIDS
Promoting regional integration (e.g., the European Union, UNASUR)
Eliminating terrorism
Ending world hunger
Promoting human rights
Promoting democracy
Coordinating international disaster relief
Encouraging foreign investment/reforming international loan frameworks
Creating jobs*

*Even though job creation is often viewed as a domestic challenge, I included this to see whether the students would gravitate towards this over the other options (as we frequently see in the case of our governments). By and large, it played out as expected.

*****

Though it largely panned out as expected, the results were nonetheless astonishing. In brief, two points came through: (1) despite analyzing the same set of facts, disagreement as to a country’s priorities was far more common than agreement; and (2) of the five countries analyzed, no two had the same number-one priority.

Although these two basic results were consistent with the lesson I was trying to convey, they actually came through more strongly than I expected. This was especially true with respect to point (1). Two of the five countries yielded no absolute commonality as to any of their top three priorities (i.e., you could not identify a single priority that appeared in all three top-three lists). For instance, in the case of Sudan, the results were as follows:

Sudan A

(1) The fight against climate change

(2) Promoting democracy

(3) Ending world hunger

Sudan B

(1) Promoting human rights

(2) Ending world hunger

(3) Eliminating terrorism

Sudan C

(1) Encouraging foreign investment

(2) Creating jobs

(3) The fight against climate change

*****

If anyone cares to see the fact patterns I used, please let me know in the comments. I’ll be happy to post them or email them to you.

In sum, it was a fun and informative exercise. If there are any international law/relations professors out there, you might consider something like this in your class. And shoot me some ideas in return! I have quite a few more classes to fill . . . .

-NF

Ecuador v. Chevron Update

fromherz — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:39:04 +0000

An Ecuadorian court has just awarded $8.2 billion in environmental remediation costs. We’ll see if it sticks. Among other things, Chevron is claiming massive corruption and collusion between the judiciary and the plaintiffs.

-NF

Breaking: Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega Looks to Win Third Term

fromherz — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:47:01 +0000

The New York Times has the story here.

Wendell Berry on Work and Agriculture

fromherz — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:50:45 +0000

As I refine my paper on soil conservation and rural culture, I’m finding much inspiration in the work of Wendell Berry. For those who don’t know Mr. Berry, here’s a nice introduction:

-NF

Morales Announces Freeway Will Not Pass Through TIPNIS

fromherz — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 03:54:26 +0000

Kudos to President Morales for making the right decision. I would have liked to see this happen earlier, but one must give credit where it’s due.

-NF

A Sad Day

fromherz — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:44:00 +0000

We just lost one of our best. Seventh Circuit Judge Terence Evans passed away last night after battling an illness that seemed to come out of nowhere.

I had the honor of clerking for Judge Evans in 2008-2009, and I will remember him as a top-flight judge and an even finer human being. Judge Evans inspired me with his approach to the law — he somehow made it come alive, infusing it with human emotion and understanding.

But more than that, he was simply a pleasure to be around. He treated everyone — from the court staff to his colleagues on the bench — with the utmost dignity and respect, and that even-handedness was just as present in his rulings. Even in January, Milwaukee felt a little warmer with the Judge around. Rest in peace, Judge.

-NF

Government Support for Green Energy

fromherz — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:59:14 +0000

A bit of shameless self-promotion (and hopefully promotion for a good cause):

Clean technology deserves government support

The Oregon Legislature has voted to do away with the Business Energy Tax Credit (“BETC”), replacing it with three smaller credits.

The legislation, House Bill 3672, now goes to Gov. John Kitzhaber for his action.

The BETC offers a major incentive to transition away from older models of energy production, affording a tax credit of up to 50 percent of the cost of renewable energy resource generation. The move to eliminate this legislation is shortsighted and ignores the history of government support for new entrants into the energy industry.

Although they laud the desire to promote green energy, critics of the BETC argue that the burgeoning industry should stand or fall on its own merits. If solar, wind and biomass firms cannot compete in the marketplace against coal, nuclear and hydro power, then they need to go back to the drawing board and create cheaper technology.

This seems like a reasonable argument. It sounds in fair play and the ever-popular notion to “let the market decide.” But here’s the problem: The market is rigged.

Between 2002 and 2008, the federal government spent $72 billion on energy subsidies to support fossil fuels. During this same seven-year stretch, renewable energy received only $29 billion in subsidies.

The disparity looks far worse when one considers that the fossil-fuel industry is an established, market-dominant player that has received massive subsidies and government support for generations.

And the fossil-fuel industry is not the only traditional power sector to benefit from public aid. In the Pacific Northwest, home to some of the cheapest electricity in the nation, the government bankrolled the massive dam infrastructure that supplies the bulk of the region’s power.

Critics of the BETC often forget these inconvenient facts. The truth is that while renewable energy has come a long way in terms of cost and efficiency, it’s still in its infancy. Clean technologies need and deserve support similar to what has aided the conventional fossil-fuel industry.

Perhaps the government should have refrained from involving itself in the energy business to begin with, but that is now a moot point. The barons of fossil fuel, nuclear power and hydroelectricity have benefitted from government subsidies for years. Even if one believes those handouts were a mistake, cutting subsidies to green energy only compounds the error by forcing this infant industry to compete against established powers without the benefit of the public aid that fueled those powers to dominance in the first place.

If we were willing to subsidize industries that have blighted the skies and destroyed salmon runs, do we really want to nickel and dime energy models that don’t pose those threats?

Nick Fromherz of Yamhill is an environmental law and policy scholar for Adelante Mujeres, an Oregon-based non-profit. He is currently working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and can be reached at nfromherz@hotmail.com.

Quinoa

fromherz — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:50:48 +0000

Interesting article from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/world/americas/20bolivia.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Now This Is More Like It

fromherz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:36:23 +0000

What can we do to make this the norm? I prefer voluntary change over forced change, but I firmly believe that a living wage is a fundamental human right. Anyone know if the UN has ever addressed this issue in a formal declaration or resolution?

-NF