Three years ago, the nations of the world met at Rio to address the challenge of climate change, and they failed to come to an agreement. At that time we wrote “The events surrounding Rio+20 last month, the huge meeting of governments that was called together by the United Nations, can be seen as a window into history as it is occurring. The nation-states are failing and new institutional frameworks are growing up to take their place.”

Once again, at the end of this year, the nations of the world will meet to address the same problem, this time in Paris. And this time there will be even more pressure on them from other institutional frameworks.

This month 60 mayors from the world’s largest cities, many of them from ICLEI, the global organization of mayors for sustainability, met with the Pope. They demanded “a bold climate agreement that confines global warming to a limit safe for humanity.”

Earlier in the month, 22 representatives from states and regions in North and South America (with the notable absence of national government representatives) met in Canada and signed an agreement to: support carbon pricing; ensure public reporting, take action in key sectors and meet existing greenhouse gas reduction agreements. One commentator called it “a new sense of empowerment & collaboration from sub-nationals across the continent.”

In May, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo invited 18 mayors from Africa as part of an approach to gather as many stakeholders as possible together to reach consensus before the U.N. summit. With Ignazio Marino, the mayor of Rome, Italy, she also invited mayors of the “capitals and big towns” of the 28 member states of the European Union to a gathering in March. The mayors, representing some 60 million inhabitants, stressed that the “fight against climate change is a priority for our towns and the well-being of our citizens.”

Hidalgo’s office is now working on a project to have 1,000 mayors from around the world present at COP 21, a spokesperson told IPS. The stakes are high because the French government wants the summit to be a success, with a new global agreement on combating climate change.

In May, voters in the oil-rich province of Alberta, Canada overturned the incumbent party in an election marked by opposition to the government’s support of oil companies and their destruction of the environment. The challengers won with a promise to establish tougher policies against climate change.

In April, climate justice advocates, community peoples and mass movements’ representatives met in Maputo, Mozambique to consider the roots, manifestations and impacts of climate change on Africa and to consider needed responses to the crises. They issued a radical declaration that concluded “Conference participants resolved to work with other movements in Africa and globally for the overturning of the capitalist patriarchal system promoted and protected by the global financial institutions, corporations and the global elite to secure the survival of humans and the rights of Mother Earth to maintain her natural cycles.”

It has become increasingly clear that a solution to the problem of global warming is not a technical problem, but rather a political problem. The means are available. It is only the political will that is lacking.

In May, MITEI, the authoritative Energy Initiative of Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report stating that solar energy can meet humanity’s future long-term energy needs while cutting greenhouse gas emissions – but to realize this potential will require increased emphasis on developing lower-cost technologies and more effective deployment policy.

At the same time, the Earth Policy Institute published “Seven Surprising Realities Behind The Great Transition to Renewable Energy” showing that the global transition to clean, renewable energy and away from nuclear and fossils is well under way. Their “seven surprising realities:”

1. Solar is now so cheap that global adoption appears unstoppable.

2. Wind power adoption is rapidly altering energy portfolios around the world.

3. National and subnational energy policies are promoting renewables, and many geographies are considering a price on carbon.

4. The financial sector is embracing renewables – and starting to turn against fossils and nuclear.

5. Coal use is in decline in the United States and will likely fall at the global level far sooner than once thought possible.

6. Transportation will move away from oil as electric vehicle fleets expand rapidly and bike- and car-sharing spreads.

7. Nuclear is on the rocks thanks to rising costs and widespread safety concerns.

It is only the political will that is lacking. Will it be there in Paris?

This month we feature articles about the peasant movement for food sovereignty, beginning with the Sixth Congress of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations-Via Campesina (CLOC-VC) that took place in Argentina. After a week of debates in workshops and assemblies, more than a thousand delegates from across Latin America and the Caribbean, together with delegates from Africa, Asia and Europe, agreed to defend “Food Sovereignty supported by the realization of a Comprehensive and Popular Agrarian Reform (which) gives us back the joy of taking care of Mother Earth and producing the food that our people and humanity needs to ensure its development.”

Here is a quotation from their final declaration:

“CLOC is the flame, the light and the actions of Via Campesina in Latin America. We emerged from the heart itself of the 500-year process of indigenous, peasant, black and popular resistance, which gathered the historical peasant movement and the new movements emerging as a response to the dismantling processes imposed by neoliberal policies. We gather strength, experience and struggles and we build proposals according to the new political moments, highlighting that the agrarian issues are relevant for the society as a whole, and as such, we need to face it with an alternative and popular power strategy.”

Despite the fact that small farmers (peasants) produce most of the food consumed by humanity, they are threatened by industrial farming and multinational companies that are trying to impose monoculture production for export and a monopoly on seeds, both of which are supported by government laws and subventions, increasingly on an international level.

A particularly eloquent advocate for the small farmer is Vandana Shiva from India, as we see from an interview with her in Switzerland: “The reasons farms are becoming fewer and larger is a highly twisted economy that punishes small farmers and rewards industrial agriculture. One reward is the $400 billion in global subsidies for large-scale farms. The other reward is that every step of law-making, such as regulations concerning standardisation of food, retail chains, and intellectual property laws, puts a huge burden on small farmers. For 10,000 years small farmers have done the job. Why only in this century has small farming become unviable? It is because the trade-driven, corporate-driven economic model for agriculture has been designed for large-scale farming. It has been designed to wipe out small farms. Around 70% of the food eaten globally today is produced by small farms. Small farms produce more and yet there is mythology that large scale farming is the answer to hunger”

Small farmers (peasants) are increasingly mobilizing around the world. In Guatemala, for example, there is a strong peasant movement to support a Rural Integral Development law which would oblige the state to assist people living in rural areas. The campesinos have continued to keep the pressure on the government to provide a solution by holding regular protests, blocking highways, and occupying space in Guatemala City, demanding that the government pass the law.

The so-called free-trade treaties, being negotiated at an international level by the most powerful countries, include institutionalized support for industrial agriculture at the expense of small farming, and for this reason these treaties are being opposed by peasant movements. They have designated April 17 as the International Day of Peasant Struggle against Transnational Companies and Free Trade Agreements. Among their actions are land occupations, seed exchanges, street demonstrations, food sovereignty fairs, cultural events, lobby tours and debates.

Seed exchanges are important because a few Transnational Companies such as Monsanto are trying to establish global monopolies on seeds. In Uruguay, the 7th National Meeting of Producers of Creole Seeds and the 6th National Festival of the Creole Seed and family farming, met under the slogan “Native seeds and the land as the heritage of peoples in the service of humanity.” Other examples of resistance by small farmers against seed monopolies are cited from Ghana, Mozambique, Niger, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Italy. In several of these countries, as well as Burkina Faso, Australia, Puerto Rico, Holland and Argentina there were demonstrations specifically against Monsanto on May 23.

Despite the fact that they are governed by the countries that support industrial agriculture, the relevant organizations of the United Nations, have recently met to sound the alarm against the destruction of small farms. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, ““Despite significant rural to urban migration, extreme poverty is becoming more concentrated in rural areas, where there are lower levels of public and private investments, poorer infrastructure and fewer services targeted to the most vulnerable. Growth in agriculture is more effective in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. We need more and better investment in agriculture.”

And according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development,  “Most of the food that people are consuming around the world comes from smallholder farms. They are not the problem, but part of the solution. We see the need of smallholder farmers to have access to markets and to have access to credit.”

Despite the advantages enjoyed by industrial agriculture, many young people in Europe and North America as well as in the South are returning to small farming. To understand their motivation, we carry an interview in CPNN this month with one such young farmer from France.

In his opening remarks to the recent symposium on Peace through Tourism in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Secretary-General of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, Taleb Rifai, listed three ways that peace can promote tourism:

“1. Tourism builds respect and mutual understanding and sparks billions of encounters that are steps towards understanding. It builds our education and it can be peace sensitive and makes travelers global citizens.

“2. Tourism improves livelihoods and creates many jobs. It can help communities value their place in the world and what they have to offer. It can help people value their music, art, gastronomy, etc.

“3. Tourism leads to reconciliation within and between societies. It can open up peoples’ minds to other visitors.”

On the three succeeding days, Feb 17-19, speaker after speaker illustrated how these themes play out in practice.

Encounters that are steps towards understanding are organized by Tour2.0 in the South African townships of Alexandra and Soweto, as described by Daniel Adidwa. As he says, “Each community has a unique story to tell. We enable the visitor to experience this uniqueness.”

Job creation was emphasized by David Scowsill, CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council. Tourism “employs over 12 million people in Europe and 63 million in Asia and 8 million in Africa. . . It grows 1% faster than the rest of the global economy annually.”

And reconciliation is promoted by the Transfrontier Peace Parks in Southern Africa, as described at the conference by Paul Bewsher. Although the emphasis is largely on natural preservation, there are also examples of transborder cultural initiatives such as the !Ae!Hai Kalahari Heritage Park which is managed in part by representatives from the ‡Khomani San and Mier communities which were previously separated by colonial borders.

The International Institute for Peace through Tourism and its President, Lou d’Amore initiated the symposium, as previously reported in CPNN. The Institute is now expanding, as there was a large delegation, including 14 youth from the new IIPT India. They told CPNN that “For us tourism used to mean just seeing new places, but now we realize that it can be a chance to know new people and to promote peace.”

Another high-level meeting took place in Cambodia two weeks earlier with very similar goals. The Conference, run by the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) tackled the question of how to harness the power of tourism and culture to alleviate poverty, create jobs, protect natural and cultural heritage and promote international understanding.