Oxfam: Rural Poor In Nepal Face Hunger From Climate Change

Among recent changes in weather patterns in Nepal are an increase in temperature extremes, more intense rainfall and increased unpredictability in weather patterns, including drier winters and delays in the summer monsoons. The melting of the Himalayan glaciers will also be felt well beyond Nepal’s borders. Scientists warn that if the Himalayan glaciers disappear – with some predicting this could happen within 30 years – the impact would be felt by more than one billion people across Asia.

Read the full report here: http://www.oxfam.org.nz/resources/onlinereports/nepal%20climate%20change_full%20report%20final.pdf

Israeli Jew Elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council

What does he hope to achieve as a Palestinian Hebrew who is a full member of the Revolutionary Council? His core message, he explains, is "to suggest" to his new colleagues that there is nothing to fear in recognising the notion of a Jewish state. "The correct response is that we will not recognise an Israel defined by political Zionism." And perhaps just as importantly, Davis believes that Fatah can expand its role from representing only Palestinian Arabs to representing all of those who oppose "settler-colonialism". "It cannot win the struggle for equality that it has waged for so long as long as it remains only representative of Palestinians. To win the moral (high ground) it has to project itself as a democratic alternative for all. That is the message I first delivered and that I have persevered with and has led to my election to the Revolutionary Council after 25 years.

BBC: As temperatures rise, treelines advance

Trees around the world are colonising new territories in response to higher temperatures. From the US west coast to northern Siberia and south-east Asia, trees are growing at higher elevations, and at higher latitudes as the climate warms. Of 166 sites studied, trees are advancing at more than half, while they are receding at just two sites. The shift is revealed by the first global analysis of treelines published in the journal Ecology Letters.

BBC: Mapping Future Water Stress

Mapping future water stress

These projections of per-capita water availability were made by Martina Floerke and colleagues at the University of Kassel in Germany. They combined different types of forecast to obtain their results. A computer model of climate change developed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre generates projections of how temperatures and rainfall are likely to change in the future. The Kassel team applied Hadley projections on a finer geographical scale. These projections were fed into a program that models water flow in river basins. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces "scenarios" suggesting how society may develop economically and socially over time. The Kassel researchers used these scenarios to project water use by various sectors of the economy. This particular analysis used the A2 scenario, where economic growth and technological change are "uneven", and population growth "high". Having forecast the availability of water and the demand from industry, it was then possible to calculate how much water would be available per person at different points in the future. These are projections, not predictions, and none of the models used are likely to be completely accurate in how they forecast the future. The projections were adapted from a paper that originally appeared in the journal Hydrological Sciences in 2007.

BBC: Rural revolution How mega farms are transforming farming in Ukraine

From the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8218104.stm

You could call it the latest foreign invasion. No tanks this time, but a state-of-the-art agricultural army is on the move.

In large swathes of the country fleets of ultra-modern combine harvesters are bringing in the harvest from new mega farms.

Food security

But it is not Ukrainian money and know-how which is driving this agricultural revolution. It is foreign governments and companies.

The Libyans are negotiating for land here, as are the Russians and others.

Many governments are looking to secure land overseas as a way to ensure the food supply to their country does not fail.
[...]
Others go further, condemning the deals done by foreign companies as a “land-grab”, as rich countries and corporations snap up huge swathes of land in poor, developing countries.

Professor Tim Lang, one of the British government’s leading food security advisers, is one such critic:

“I feel sorry for Ukraine, here it is, it was colonised by the Russians, it was the grain basket for many, many years, it went downhill and now it is being asset stripped again by the West,” he says.

“You could say that it is good for the Ukraine, that it is getting inside investment from rich countries, that its productivity will go up, that since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has not had the requisite investment, that at least under Stalinism there was a huge amount of that sort of investment – you can paint that picture – but I’m not convinced by that.”

UK Guardian: The struggle against debt servitude

A kinder, simpler solution to the problem of runaway consumer debt: cap the interest rate at a reasonable figure.   Usury laws were once universal, probably owing to some language in the Bible on the proper rate of interest.  That all went by the wayside in the Reagan era, when states revised their usury laws to remove penalties for excessive interest.  S.C. did so in 1982.  The current Great Recession places extreme financial pressure on working people who must service debt acquired in fatter times, in some cases in complex mortgage arrangements that are partly to blame for the crisis.

London Citizens, a civic association in the UK, is sponsoring a campaign to cap the rate of interest in that country:

Following the financial crash of last year, a new issue emerged and a new campaign was forged. Our members experienced an increase in interest rates on money loans. The banks, many of which were now owned in substantial part by the public, were borrowing at half a percent but lending the money back to us at 40 times that rate, and more. Each of the major banks have credit card interest rates that start in the 20s and rise steeply with penalties. The same is true of consumption and mortgage loans when penalty payments see the rates jump into the 40s and 50s – more than a hundred times the interest charged to the banks. This is setting aside the bridging and pay-day loans sold by companies such as Shopacheck and Providential, where the interest rates start in the hundreds and go their own way from there. The cost of not earning enough to live has never been higher.

Our faith communities had no difficulty in naming this. They call it usury: the charging of excessive interest by the rich upon the poor with the corresponding transfer of whatever slender assets the weaker party had accumulated. They think it’s wrong and have decided to do something about it. And so was born the anti-usury campaign.

This has one goal: to establish a maximum beyond which it would be illegal to charge interest. We have a meeting tomorrow with the Royal Bank of Scotland where we will raise the possibility of a 10% maximum credit card. They are committed to being “responsible lenders” and we would like to help them fulfil that.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/11/anti-usury-campaign

Links: London Citizen

Spartanburg Herald Journal: Tax relief was tax hike for most

Source:  http://www.goupstate.com/article/20090806/ARTICLES/908061052/1083/ARTICLES?Title=Tax-relief-turned-out-to-be-tax-hike-for-most-homeowners

Tax relief was tax hike for most
$1M Spartanburg homes see big property tax cut

By Robert W. Dalton
bob.dalton@shj.com

Published: Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 12:20 a.m.

The majority of Spartanburg County homeowners now pay more in property taxes than they did before the much-hyped tax relief the state Legislature approved in 2006.

As an added bonus, they also pay an extra penny on the state sales tax, part of the swap lawmakers worked out to remove school operating taxes from owner-occupied property.

Owners of $100,000 homes in the city of Spartanburg paid $889 in 2006, the year before Act 388 went into effect. That dropped to $863 in 2007, but climbed to $921 last year, according to figures from Spartanburg County Auditor Sharon West. West said she wouldn’t know until September what the taxes would look like this year.

Almost 39,600 Spartanburg County homes are valued at $100,000 or below, with about the same number worth more than $100,000.

For residents with a $1 million home — 35 houses in the county are valued at $1 million or more — the 2008 tax bill was $8,791, down from $14,990 the year before Act 388 took effect.

State Rep. Harold Mitchell said the figures prove what he was saying when the Legislature debated the tax swap — that the plan was designed to bail out the wealthy. Mitchell was one of 31 House members to vote against the swap.

“The numbers don’t lie,” said Mitchell, D-Spartanburg. “The owners of these 39,000 homes are working-class citizens of Spartanburg. “There’s already a financial crunch, and their taxes are increasing at a time like this.”

State Sen. Lee Bright said he’s opposed to property taxes, period. He said it was only fair to give high-end homes the same break as more modest residences.

“Higher wage earners pay a disproportionate amount of taxes now,” said Bright, R-Roebuck. “With the amount of taxes they pay now, to say any kind of tax reduction would bail out the wealthy is not accurate.”

Bright said the real issue is the state’s spending habits. He said if lawmakers control spending, the taxing issue will take care of itself.

“We continue to talk about tax policy, but the elephant in the room is our spending problem,” Bright said.

Owners of $200,000 homes in the city paid $2,455 in 2006 and $1,795 last year. Owners of $500,000 homes paid $7,156 in 2006 and $4,419 in 2008.

One reason for the disparity is that owners of homes valued up to $100,000 already were exempt from school operating taxes under a 1995 tax relief plan. But millage increases quickly erased the modest reductions they experienced under Act 388.

Act 388 prevents local governments, school districts and other taxing entities from increasing millage by more than a formula based on population growth plus inflation. But, West said, most entities are going up to the limit.

“If they miss it one year, they can’t go back and recoup it under Act 388,” West said.

Spartanburg County Administrator Glenn Breed said the county has increased its millage the full amount both years Act 388 has been in effect.

“If you don’t approve it one year, you lose it forever — or until the act is changed,” he said.

Breed said the ongoing budget crisis has compounded the problem. The state cut about $2.5 million in funding to the county this year.

“Where do you make that up?” Breed said. “It kind of forces the issue.”

Breed said taxpayers will be “stuck in this same scenario” until the Legislature amends Act 388 or approves another property tax reform package.

Bright said that’s not going to happen in the session that begins in January.

“I know there’s been a lot of talk about repealing Act 388, but that’s not going to happen,” he said. “There are a lot of issues that are going to come to the forefront, and that’s not going to be revisited.”