Asian Alliance for Solidarity Economy

Considering that climate change represents a real threat to the existence of humanity, of living beings and our Mother Earth as we know it today;

Noting the serious danger that exists to islands, coastal areas, glaciers in the Himalayas, the Andes and mountains of the world, poles of the Earth, warm regions like Africa, water sources, populations affected by increasing natural disasters, plants and animals, and ecosystems in general;

Making clear that those most affected by climate change will be the poorest in the world who will see their homes and their sources of survival destroyed, and who will be forced to migrate and seek refuge;Confirming that 75% of historical emissions of greenhouse gases originated in the countries of the North that followed a path of irrational industrialization;

Noting that climate change is a product of the capitalist system;

Regretting the failure of the Copenhagen Conference caused by countries called “developed”, that fail to recognize the climate debt they have with developing countries, future generations and Mother Earth;

Affirming that in order to ensure the full fulfillment of human rights in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to recognize and respect Mother Earth’s rights;

Reaffirming the need to fight for climate justice;

Recognizing the need to take urgent actions to avoid further damage and suffering to humanity, Mother Earth and to restore harmony with nature;

Confident that the peoples of the world, guided by the principles of solidarity, justice and respect for life, will be able to save humanity and Mother Earth, and

Celebrating the International Day of Mother Earth,

The Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia calls on the peoples of the world, social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders, and invites scientists, academics, lawyers and governments that want to work with their citizens to the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights to be held from 20th to 22nd April 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights has as objectives:

1) To analyze the structural and systemic causes that drive climate change and to propose radical measures to ensure the well-being of all humanity in harmony with nature

2) To discuss and agree on the project of a Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights

3) To agree on proposals for new commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and projects for a COP Decision under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change that will guide future actions in those countries that are engaged with life during climate change negotiations and in all United Nations scenarios, related to:

Climate debt

- Climate change migrants-refugees

- Emission reductions

- Adaptation

- Technology transfer

- Finance

- Forest and Climate Change

- Shared Vision

- Indigenous Peoples, and

- Others

4) To work on the organization of the Peoples’ World Referendum on Climate Change

5) To analyze and develop an action plan to advance the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal

6) To define strategies for action and mobilization to defend life from Climate Change and to defend Mother Earth’s Rights.

Bolivia, January 5th, 2010

Evo Morales Ayma

President of the

Plurinational State of Bolivia

Who cannot be bought;

Whose word is their bond;

Who put character above wealth;

Who possess opinions and a will;

Who are larger than their vocation;

Who do not hesitate to take chances;

Who will not lose their individuality in a crowd;

Who will be as honest in small things as in great things;

Who will make no compromise with wrong;

Whose ambitions are not confined to their own selfish desires;

Who will not say they do it “because everybody does it;”

Who are true to their friends through good report and evil

report, in adversity as  well as in prosperity;

Who do not believe that shrewdness, cunning and

hard-headedness are the best qualities for winning

success;

Who are not ashamed or afraid to stand for the truth when it is

unpopular. who can say “no” with emphasis, although the

rest of the world says “yes.”

– Author unknown –

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There is no doubt that the number of new ideas emerging in the field of humane, sustainable economics is accelerating.  But complete blueprints are still pretty few and far between.  Even so, our British colleagues at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) have created an outline that is both impressive and hopeful.  Their blueprint offers a coherent foundation on which to build a future economics. They have called it “The Great
Transition.”

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Eric Harris Braun,
Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Dan Levinson, Richard Norgaard, Constance
Packard, Will Raap, Gus Speth, Joseph Stanislaw, Peter Victor, Stewart
Wallis.
Advisory Board: Peter Barnes, Tanya Berry, Wendell Berry, Lisa Byers, Olivia
Dreier, Merrian Fuller, Hazel Henderson, Wes Jackson, Amory Lovins, Bill
McKibben, John McKnight, Otto Scharmer, Michael Shuman, David Orr, Cathrine
Sneed, Lewis Solomon, John Todd, Doug Tompkins, Greg Watson, and Arthur
Zajonc.

*************************************************************

The main question we need to know about any vision of the future is what it is that has driven the change.  In the case of The Great Transition, it is the rising costs of going back to ‘business-as-usual’, the huge cumulative cost of climate change (they estimate this at $3.75 trillion in the UK by 2050) and the cumulative cost of high levels of inequality (they estimate this at $6.75 trillion for the UK in 2050).

Drivers of change are often uncomfortable, and this one is no exception.  What is exciting about The Great Transition is that it sets out a believable path whereby Britain can take big, radical steps toward a society and economy that delivers long, happy and equitable lives and fits within the planet’s carrying capacity.

It means that the UK’s conventional GDP will fall by a third.  This is offset by making better use of what they have, and by an economic boost from increasing social and environmental value.  The costs of climate change can be partly avoided and the costs of social breakdown can be avoided too.

New Economics Foundation policy director Andrew Simms put it like this. “For years we have been told that there is no alternative to an economy that wrecks the environment and worsens inequality.  We’ve been told that we live in a time of prosperity, when really we’re no happier than we were thirty years ago.  We’ve been told that crashes, bubbles and recessions are all part of the ‘natural cycle’ of economies.  But faced with potentially irreversible climate change and corrosive inequality, these are dangerous fairy tales. The Great Transition shows we have a chance of a better reality.”

The point is that, as we know, GDP is a very poor measure of progress: the revenues skimmed off the financial system by traders in the City of London as they built a pyramid of ‘toxic’ derivatives added to GDP.  So does cleaning up the effects of pollution and paying the costs of high rates of crime increases. This isn’t just an academic point: what we measure ends up driving what we do. The Great Transition proposes a move beyond GDP, to start measuring the things which really produce value, for our communities, our societies and our environment.

The report sets out seven main interventions.  These include:

- A Great Revaluing to make sure that prices reflect true social and environmental costs.
- A Great Rebalancing that sets out a new productive relationship between markets, society and the state.
- A Great Economic Irrigation that helps money and investment flow to where it is most needed.

But how do we get there?  The Great Transition suggests a universal Citizen’s Endowment of between £40,000 and £50,000 to give every adult an equal chance in life and the opportunity to invest in education, a business or local productive assets.  This would be funded by a phased rise in inheritance tax on all estates up to 67 per cent and would go a long way to reducing the massive inequalities of inherited wealth in the UK.
Community land trusts are also central to The Great Transition.  The report also proposes redistributing working time by setting out a four-day working week for everyone that would cut GDP by a third without a major loss of jobs.

There would be a major reorganisation of business, with publicly listed companies progressively transferring shares to their staff, giving them real control over the companies where they work.  This would lead to the creation of a series of co-operatives, operating in regulated markets, and subject to competition from new companies.  This is designed to change power relations within workplaces, creating a form of economic democracy.

There would be new variable consumption taxes, replacing income tax, reflecting the social and environmental costs of goods. A windfall tax on
the profits of fossil fuel companies, for example, could channel funds into clean energy projects.  There would be government lending for large-scale green energy and transport projects, channelled through a national Green Investment Bank.  There would be a new national Housing Bank, more along the lines of those in the USA, offering people the opportunity to transfer a portion of their mortgage debt into equity and paying social rent on the balance.

There would be new regulations on the reserve requirements of private banks, which would be related to the social and environmental value of their investments.  This is intended to engineer a ‘race to the top’, avoiding the more familiar race to the bottom, at the same time as reducing speculation and credit bubbles.

The purpose of The Great Transition is to inspire debate.  It was designed for the UK not the USA.  Many of the measures will be controversial.  Some will be wholly unacceptable to people who are already steeped in sustainability.  But it is a bold and coherent vision, with details and
figures ­ using the skills of novelists, as much as the skills of economists, to create a believable world.  And it suggests that other kinds
of economic worlds are possible.  That, in itself, represents hope.

David Boyle may be reached at:
davidboyle@smallisbeautiful.org

by Scott Allford
October 18, 2009

[As shared by Melvyn Patrick Lopez]

Justified in believing that the If you live outside of the Philippines and you watch or read the news you may feel very Philippines is a very dangerous country, savaged by typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and terrorist attacks.  You may also be assured in your belief that it is a poor country with images of children picking through garbage, slums, and corruption scandals broadcast in most international news reports.  I am not going to deny that these things are true, however, they are not all that the country contains.  Not every person in the Philippines is poor, a terrorist or a victim of terror.  In fact other countries around the world suffer from these same problems yet they do not become iconic images of those nations.

The Common View of the Philippines
A few months ago I was at a roof-top birthday party in Makati filled with socialites and expats.  Whilst there I was introduced to a German ‘journalist’, and my friend asked him why the Philippines is portrayed in such a negative light in the foreign media.  His response was in two parts; Firstly because in his experience he could not sell stories about the Philippines in Germany if they were not about poverty, violence or corruption.  Secondly, he said that because there is so much poverty, violence, and corruption, there is nothing else to report on.  After saying this, he sipped his glass of red wine and was whisked away into a group of Filipino socialites.

Perhaps the red wine was ‘poor’ in taste, or the fact that that particular roof-top was one of the few in Makati which doesn’t have a swimming pool made him focus on the poverty in the Philippines, or maybe the sounds of merrymaking were ‘violent’ on his ears.  I think that it was none of these things.  Germany, a developed country, has slums.  But if the focus can be moved away from the poverty in the developed countries and put on some islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, then people in developed countries can feel a little bit better.

I remember growing up in Australia, taking garbage out to the dump after cleaning up the garden.  I would see Aboriginals picking through the garbage for food.  Yet that has never been an iconic image of Australia.  I went to ‘water villages’ in Malaysia and Brunei and thought how similar they look to slums in Manila.  Yet ‘water villages’ are tourist attractions and the slums here are not.  I lived in South Korea a few hundred kilometres away from the DMZ, with jets and helicopters flying overhead all the time it felt like a war zone.  In the spring I would have 40 tanks facing in the direction of my apartment.  Yet South Korea is generally not viewed or branded as a dangerous country.  And South Korea has slums too.  Perhaps the time will come when people outside the Philippines will come to realize that the branded image of the Philippines portrayed in the media is only a small piece of the full picture of this country.

A Different View
Since the Philippines was settled by people 30,000 years ago, this country has blossomed into a mix of over 180 indigenous ethnic groups, over half of which also represent unique linguistic groups.  This array of cultures, languages and cultural artifacts cannot be matched by most nations of the world.  From the Ilocano, Pangasinense, Kapampangan, Tagalog, Bicolano, and Visayans to the Binukid, Moros, Ati, Igorot, and the T’boli, just to name a few.  These cultures are rich, strong and proud and in most cases the people that make up these cultures are very friendly and welcoming to outsiders.  On a trip to Sagada I was welcomed into a very warm and friendly Kankanaey family. They showed us around Sagada and told us stories of Kankanaey cultural practices.  They even taught me how to wear a traditional bahag (a hand-loomed loin cloth or G-string).

Neighbouring Sagada is Ifugao, with vast rice terraces that shape the mountains of the region.  The oldest rice terraces are 6,000 years old, which is 1,000 years older than the oldest pyramid in Egypt.  If put end to end the rice terraces dwarf the Great Wall of China, and the rice terraces were not made by using slave labor like most other ancient wonders of the world.

The Banaue Rice Terraces are a UNESCO World Heritage site.  But they are not alone.  The Philippines have numerous UNESCO world heritage sites including the Baroque churches of San Agustin Church in Manila, Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion in Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur, San Agustin Church in Paoay, Ilocos Norte, and Sto. Tomas de Villanueva Church in Miag-ao, Iloilo.  There is also the beautiful and historic town of Vigan in Ilocos Sur.  Furthermore, there are the natural UNESCO World Heritage sites of the Puerto-Princesa Subterranean River National Park and the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park.

Lastly, the Philippines consists of 7,107 beautiful islands.  These islands contain remote beaches and amazing rock formations as well as other natural wonders like the Chocolate Hills in Bohol, the perfectly conical Mt. Mayon volcano or the stunning Bacuit Bay in El Nido, Palawan.  B ut also on these islands is a range of biodiversity not seen in most other places on the planet. In Romblon, Sibuyan Island is known as the Galapagos of Asia as it contains such a diverse range of species which can be found nowhere else on the planet.  If you get off these islands and dive into the cool blue-turquoise waters of the Philippines, you may also see some of the richest biodiversity in the world’s seas.  The Verde Island Passage has been named as the ‘centre of the centre’ of marine biodiversity in the world.  It has over 300 species of corals as well as vast numbers of fish that you will not find anywhere else.

With all that this country has to offer, I am baffled as to why it has been branded in such a negative way by the international media.  However, I think that more and more people are starting to discover that there is a different side to the Philippines to the one they have been bombarded with for the past few decades. Those who come to the Philippines to seek out the beauty of this country will not be disappointed.  However, first time travelers to the Philippines should beware, just like me and many other foreigners, this amazing country may compel you to stay quite a bit longer than you initially planned.      < http://www.facebook.com/l/91e9e;pinoyyellowbug.wordpress.com/>

Scott M. Allford  has lived and worked in Australia and South Korea and has traveled extensively throughout Asia – Mongolia, China, Tibet, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and Japan – fell in love with the Philippines  and decided to allocate at least two years to comprehensively cover the country.
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By Judith Hitchman

Firstly, happy new year to you.

I fully concur with the idea of this tranfer, and wholeheartedly agree that the communication issues need to be discussed

For the last five years or so I have sporadically played a part in helping facilitate communication within RIPESS between English & French speakers, (Spanish is not one of my own work languages) both in translating and also as you know in organising interpreting for the whole Lux09 meeting.

The communication in any international network plays a crtical part in the success or failure to grow & have a socially relevant impact. It is therefore paramount that we develop both tools and a team to support RIPESS on the road towards 2013.

There are a certain number of tools, such as electronic fora and newsletters that can help. Concerning the fora, they are difficult to manage, because people need to be motivated to moderate them and to make contributions. My own feeling is that they work best on short term projects (which can be multiplied). Francoise Wautiez has a lot of experience in that. The one moderated by Martine Theveniaut before your Tokyo meeting worked well, because she uploaded a lot of contributions… Those in the count-down to Lux09 were not so successful… Contributions also tend to be in the language in which the Forum is launched, and tend not to cross the language divide naturally, so translation & summaries are required.

Newsletters (particularly global ones) can only work if people effectively contribute from their regions. Eric Lavilluniere who I have included on this list, as a RIPESS EU representative and organiser of fora & newsletters has a lot of experience & can input good ideas.

One key question (a perpetual one) is how to balance voluntary contributions in terms of the work required (a lot with the need to pay the bills, so the network & those participating in the work can meet the objectives, and and finding the requisite funding for the work. For those who are salaried workers, the voluntary issue is easily sorted. For those wo are retired, likewise. For the rest of us (and most interpreters/translators fall into this category) there is an on-going dilemma of commitment versus the need to pay feed the family/pay the bills etc, which means that we sometimes are/are not able do the work.

Many networks are in this situation today. The Via Campesina has created a pool of volunteer translators that is sufficiently big to get everything translated into all 3 key languages all the time. The Assembly of Social Movements is trying to do the same, and has just started to publish a monthly newsletter in EN/FR & ES. What seems to be happening is an increase in effective communication. But the key to this is to either succeed in building up a core team of translators that is big enough (very difficult but not impossible) or raise funding to pay a dedicated team to do the work.

Having analysed some of the communication issues, I do think they still require some thought and organisational as well as financial support! However i want to say that I shall do all I can to help as much as possible.

Best wishes.