Good COP, bad COP?

With 30,000 people applying for accreditation, and an estimated 5,000 media, global meetings finally reached 'stadium rock' proportions and most likely took on the carbon footprint of a U2 tour. However, given the miserable outcomes there will be few calls for an encore, although the long and winding road will go on for sometime to come.

It certainly didn't go well for agriculture and the small farmers of this world. Of course, there was the Agriculture and Rural Development Day at the COP15 and the joint statement Beyond Copenhagen: Agriculture and Forestry Are Part of the Solution calling for among other things climate negotiators to agree on the early establishment of an agricultural work program under the SBSTA. No idea where or how that ended up. I expect it got abandoned in the hair-splitting and horse trading, the sport of politicians. Here is what the folks over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog had to say, including Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

While hundreds of activists demonstrated to ‘change the food system, not the climate’, the Ecologist suggests that Copenhagen could lead to increase in intensive farming. The Ecologist goes on to discuss the implications of missing out on agriculture as part of the deal and why small-scale farmers should be part of this. The LEISA's Farm blog did a nice job of navigating through the 'megabytes of text' to highlight the relevant issues and organisations campaigning for agriculture at COP15. There was also useful coverage of agriculture and climate change over at the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research. While not commenting specifically on outcomes of agriculture and COP15, USC Canada also did a nice job of consolidating some useful resources on food, farming and climate change. While the CGIAR's Rural Climate Exchange provided an up-to-date thread of issues and debates.

Personally I was disappointed that someone like Paul Collier was able to get up at an IIED funded event (Development and Climate Day) and call for GMOs as a solution for climate change impacts to agriculture in Africa while Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made one of the best statements of the week, "If the climate was a bank, a capitalist bank, [the West] would have saved it by now."

While all the bickering was going on it as been business as usual for thousands of communities the world over on the frontline of climate change on a daily basis, because they certainly can't wait for the international circus to come to their aid.