Cropped 11 September 2024: Japan rice crisis; EU’s farming future; Environmental defender violence

§ Key developments

Climate-fuelled food shortages

VEGETABLE CRISIS: Crops of aubergine, cabbage and cucumbers in northern China have been “decimated” by torrential rainfall, which came shortly after weeks of drought, the New York Times reported. Videos posted on social media in the city of Shijiazhuang showed how “days of downpours and an overflowing reservoir had turned soil into sludge unfit for growing plants”, the newspaper said. It added that the arrival of floods “caught people off guard”, sending national vegetable prices up to their highest level in nearly five years. The spike is “hitting the pocketbooks of consumers who already face hard spending choices as China’s economy has slowed”, according to the publication.

RICE SHORTAGES: Japan is facing its largest rice shortage in 30 years, according to the Financial Times. Supermarkets have limited customers to one bag at a time, the FT said, adding that the shortage has “variously [been] blamed on an influx of sushi-hungry tourists, extreme weather and decades of misguided agricultural policy”. Such policies include encouraging farmers to “set aside” rice paddies and decrease production, over concerns around Japan’s shrinking population and changing tastes, it added. Meanwhile, neighbouring South Korea is facing issues producing kimchi, Reuters reported, with crops of the napa cabbage that is fermented to create the dish affected by recent extreme temperatures.

SQUEEZED ORANGES: Global orange juice prices have soared to an all-time high, as yields in the biggest exporting country Brazil have been hit by severe drought and disease outbreaks, the Financial Times reported. The price hikes are “extremely dire” for soft drinks companies, an analyst told the newspaper. Brayan Palhares, a citrus grower from São Paulo state, told the FT that 2024 was the worst in terms of productivity since his father started growing oranges in 1970. In parts of his land that have produced an average of 1,800 boxes per hectare over the last 10 years, this season delivered only 470 boxes, he added, “making this year extremely difficult”. Carbon Brief recently reported on how climate change is causing food price spikes globally.

EU’s farming future

SUBSIDY SWITCH: A new Brussels-commissioned report recommended a “major overhaul” of EU farm subsidies by paying farmers “based on their income rather than the size of their farms”, the Financial Times said. The report followed consultations between “farmers, NGOs, consumer and food retailers” set up after farmer protests earlier this year. According to the FT, the report warned that “business as usual, be it economic, social or environmental, is not an option”. It recommended that EU subsidies providing “direct support to farmers according to the amount of land they own” should instead support certain “active farmers” based on their finances, the FT said. The report was presented to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on 4 September. 

MEAT MENTIONED: The report also acknowledged that “Europeans eat more animal protein than scientists recommend”, the Guardian noted. The newspaper added: “It says support is needed to rebalance diets toward plant-based proteins such as better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock.” Von der Leyen said the findings, while not binding, would “feed into a planned vision for agriculture that she will present in the first 100 days of her new mandate”, according to the Guardian. The commission president “must pay close attention to [the] report, and start to make some real change” to ensure a sustainable farming future, Greenpeace EU agriculture policy director Marco Contiero said in a statement. 

LONG-TERM IMPACTS: Politico outlined other recommendations from the report, including for the EU executive to set “customised emissions reduction goals for different types of agriculture”. The outlet noted: “It’s not clear whether the broader food and agriculture sector will back the results, given that the report’s conclusions touched on issues that politically powerful farming groups have opposed, while its language on issues strongly backed by green NGOs was at times timid.” 

§ Spotlight

Environmental defenders’ fight and the road to COP16

In this spotlight, Carbon Brief looks at the new Global Witness report on environmental and land defenders and its implications for the upcoming COP16 biodiversity summit.

Global Witness launched a report this week on the violence faced by environmental and land defenders around the world.

Between 2012 and 2023, the report found, there were 2,106 assassinations of environmental and land defenders, with 196 murders registered last year alone.

For the second year in a row, Latin America was the deadliest region for defenders, with 166 killings, or 85% of all reported cases. This is also the second year in which Colombia leads the list of the countries with the largest number of defender killings, at 79. Brazil was next, with 25 murders, and Mexico and Honduras each had 18.

The assassinations were primarily linked to the mining industry, but there were also killings associated with fishing, illegal logging, agroindustry and infrastructure, the report said.

Behind violence

Laura Furones, a senior advisor of the land and environmental defenders campaign and  lead author of the Global Witness report, told Carbon Brief that the statistics show that “the majority of cases remain unpunished”.

Paradoxically, she said, the violence against defenders in Latin America is itself a reaction to the strength of civil society organisations and Indigenous and peasant movements in that region. When these groups “stand up against injustice, natural resources exploitation and climate injustices”, she told Carbon Brief, it “causes violence to increase”.

By contrast, in Africa and Asia, there is “a huge problem in accessing information to document cases”, since social movements are not as strong and state regimes are not sufficiently democratic, Furones said. She added that “if we had access to what is actually happening [there], the figures would be different”. 

In an accompanying press release, Global Witness noted that in the UK, EU and US, “environmental defenders are also being increasingly subject to [a] range of tactics for silencing [them]”.

Although the violence levels and assassinations are lower in the global north than in other regions, there is still repression of environmental movements. For example, in the UK, activists have been imprisoned with “absolutely disproportionate” jail sentences or fines “for exercising a peaceful protest”, Furones told Carbon Brief.

Human rights and COP16

The report also noted that nearly half of killings were targeted at Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples globally.

The cause of environmental and land defenders is one for human rights too, Furones said, as they are asking for “fundamental” rights to their lands, freedom of expression and access to justice to be respected.

International policies protecting environmental defenders have seen progress this year. In April, Latin American countries approved an action plan to enact the Escazú Agreement – a legally binding regional treaty that aims to protect environmental defenders and promote public participation in and access to information on environmental matters. 

For Furones, the upcoming COP16 biodiversity summit, to be held in Colombia in October this year, represents an opportunity for Gustavo Petro’s government to take a global lead in driving down killings and violence against environmental and land defenders, especially since Colombia’s constitutional court has recently ratified the Escazú Agreement.

She told Carbon Brief:

“What we want to see is [this] translated into results, into concrete proposals and mechanisms to bring down the numbers of violence in the territories.”

§ News and views

REEF SWAP: The US and Indonesia finalised a “milestone” $35m debt-for-nature swap to conserve coral reefs in the south-east Asian archipelago, Mongabay reported. The agreement “aims to conserve coral reefs in eastern Indonesia over the next nine years, with the funding offset by cancelled sovereign debt payable to the US”, the outlet said. The deal was met with a “mix of optimism and scepticism from environmentalists” who are hoping for “more robust monitoring of the impact of reef conservation work”, Mongabay added. The outlet noted: “Indonesia is home to 16% of the world’s coral reef areas and almost two-thirds of all coral species.” 

INDIGENOUS RECOGNITION: Indigenous groups from around the world met in Bogotá, Colombia earlier this month to call for the upcoming COP16 biodiversity summit to be a “milestone” for respecting Indigenous rights, the Spanish publication EFEVerde reported. The groups are requesting countries at the summit to agree to enforce Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which says that parties must respect Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, according to the newswire. Elsewhere, a comment article in Nature by a group of researchers said that the oft-cited statistic that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories is “wrong” and may be harmful to such communities. 

NAMIBIA CRISIS: More than 700 wild animals, including hippos, zebras and elephants, are being culled in Namibia to provide meat for starving populations as the country faces its worst drought in 100 years, Al Jazeera reported. Around 84% of the southern African nation’s food reserves have been used up as a result of the drought, according to UN figures, with nearly half of the total population of 2.5 million expected to experience high levels of food insecurity from July to September, Al Jazeera said. Hunters and safari operators are being contracted to kill the animals, which include 30 hippos, 60 buffalos, 50 impalas, 100 wildebeest, 300 zebras, 83 elephants and 100 antelopes, it added.

FARM AUSTERITY: The UK government is planning to cut England’s “nature-friendly farming budget” by £100m to plug a gap in public finances, according to the Guardian. The cut “would mean at least 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland”, the newspaper said, based on research from the RSPB. The outlet added: “Nature groups and farmers have called this a ‘big mistake’, saying it jeopardised the government’s legally binding targets to improve nature.” Separately, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said it would be “tricky” to meet the union’s goal to reach net-zero farming emissions in England and Wales by 2040, a decade ahead of UK-wide targets, BBC News reported. The 2040 aim, set by the NFU in 2019, is at risk due to a “lack of investment in climate-friendly farming measures” by the last UK government, the union claimed. 

DROUGHT-BOOSTED FIRES: Bolivia has declared a national emergency as a result of severe forest fires, which have burned across 3m hectares of land since July, Reuters reported. The South American country is facing its largest number of wildfires since 2010 amid drought conditions, according to Inpe, Brazil’s fire-monitoring space research agency, the newswire added. Meanwhile, a second Reuters story said that the number of fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest region for the month of August surged to the highest level since 2010, according to government data. The nation is also facing a historic drought, it added.

HIGH-SEAS CASH: The first batch of funding related to the global High Seas Treaty agreed last year was approved by the Global Environment Facility, according to the Pacific Islands News Association. The outlet said $700,000 will be put towards supporting efforts “in the Marshall Islands, Palau, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu related to the new agreement’s ratification and implementation readiness”. (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on the High Seas Treaty and what it means for the sustainable use and conservation of the high seas.) 

§ Watch, read, listen

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS: The Climate Question, a BBC World Service podcast, looked at the prospects for the “future of wine”, with growing-conditions altered due to climate change. 

BRAZIL AGRI: A Dialogue Earth investigation explored the “link between the use of pesticides and the increase in serious health conditions among rural babies” in Brazil.

METHANE HOTSPOTS: A joint project by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations has revealed and mapped the UK’s largest methane-emitting hotspots.

ITOMBWE OWL: Mongabay reported on efforts to track down the Itombwe owl, a small brown bird only found in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was last seen by humans in 1996.

§ New science

Deforestation triggered by artisanal mining in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Nature Sustainability

Artisanal mining triggered almost 7% of deforestation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo between 2002 and 2018, according to a new study. To assess the impact mining operations in forests have on deforestation, the researchers used land-use data and modelling. They found that the deforestation resulting from the creation of a mining area is “dwarfed by the cumulative impact of other, triggered land uses” in the 225 identified artisanal mines in forests. The indirect deforestation was 28 times larger than the forest area directly cleared for mining, mostly through increased farming around mines and forest cleared for settlements. 

Environmental stress reduces shark residency to coral reefs
Communications Biology

Stress to coral reefs caused by climate change-fuelled coral bleaching and other environmental factors is driving reef sharks away, with negative consequences for the entire ecosystem, new research found. The study combined acoustic tracking data from grey reef sharks with a satellite-based index of coral reef environmental stress exposure. The authors found that “increased stress on the reefs significantly reduces grey reef shark residency”, with the effects lasting up to 16 months. They added that this could have “important physiological and conservation consequences for reef sharks, as well as broader implications for reef ecosystem functioning”.

Disproportionate low-elevation forest loss in over 65% of the world’s mountains calls for targeted conservation
One Earth

New research found “disproportionate forest loss” at lower elevations on more than 65% of mountains around the world. Analysing global mountain map data, the researchers assessed the elevation patterns of forest loss in 769 mountains in forested areas and separated actual forest loss from the natural absence of forest. The identified loss patterns can be explained by “high human impacts and low precipitation at these levels”, according to the researchers. Low-elevation forest loss “can severely threaten species relying on such habitat and even negatively affect high-elevation species”, the study authors wrote, calling for “targeted forest protection and restoration at lower elevations for mountains worldwide”. 

§ In the diary

• 10-30 September: 79th session of the UN General Assembly | New York
• 17-20 September: 20th meeting of the FAO’s Chemical Review Committee | Rome
• 22 September: Switzerland biodiversity initiative referendum
• 22-23 September: Summit of the Future | New York
• 22-28 September: Climate Week NYC 2024 | New York
• 23-27 September: 20th meeting of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee to the Stockholm Convention | Rome

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to [email protected].