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Agricultural Commodities, Trade and Sustainable Development
(International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 2005) Lines, Thomas
"Talks on agricultural trade liberalization at the World Trade Organization must take into account the needs of commodity-dependent developing countries, to ensure that agricultural trade and commodity production will deliver outcomes that favour both the environment and poverty reduction. Alongside the trade negotiations, there are also hot debates amongst a range of actors and networks on ensuring functioning of domestic agricultural markets, improving governance and sustainability in bulk commodity markets among civil society groups. Environmental and conservation groups seek the application of better management practices (BMPs) organized either through segregated supply chains or through preferential access to markets and finance.This group is focused on private regulation, upgrading of buyer-driven chains, and supply chain management. Elsewhere, a cluster of organizations are revisiting supply management to reduce oversupply and price volatility, focusing on learning lessons from the failures of International Commodity Agreements (ICAs). And a group of farmer and development organizations is concerned about growing corporate concentration in commodity markets and the impact of skewed market power on the small and decreasing share of wealth finding its way back to primary producers.This group is focused on competition policy and corporate accountability."
Public Assets, Private Profits: Reclaiming the American Commons in an Age of Market Enclosure
(New America Foundation, 2001) Bollier, David
"Many of the resources that Americans own as a people - forests and minerals under public lands, public information and federally financed research, the broadcast airwaves and public institutions and traditions - are increasingly being taken over by private business interests. These appropriations of common assets are siphoning revenues from the public treasury, shifting ownership and control from public to private interests, and eroding democratic processes and shared cultural values. "In the face of this marketization of public resources, most Americans do not realize that some of our most valuable assets are collective and social in character - our 'common wealth.' Collectively, U.S. citizens own one-third of the surface area of the country, as well as the mineral-rich continental shelf. Huge deposits of oil, uranium, natural gas and other mineral wealth can be found on public lands, along with rich supplies of timber, fresh water and grazing land. Beyond environmental resources, the American people own dozens of other assets with substantial market value, including government- funded research and development, the Internet, the airwaves and the public information domain. "Our government, for its part, is not adequately protecting these assets. Instead, it is selling them off at huge discounts, giving them away for free, or marketizing resources that should not be sold in the first place. These include, public lands, genetic structures of life, the public's intellectual property rights, and cherished civic symbols. "The growing appropriations of public assets - and the spread of market values to areas of life where they should not go - could be called the 'enclosure' of the American commons."
Renewing the Commons: University Reform in an Era of Weakened Democracy and Environmental Crises
(2006) Bowers, Chet A.
"The initial question that prompted the writing of this book was: What is there about a university education that enables so many graduates to make the seemingly seamless transition from the classroom to becoming advisors and supporters of President George W. Bush's policies? This question led to a consideration of the three main themes that set this manuscript off from other critiques of the policies of President Bush. First, the entire analysis, as well as recommendations for reforming universities, addresses how the current misuse of our two most prominent political terms of liberalism and conservatism leads to a basic misunderstanding of the policies that are being pursued under these two labels. I point out that the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration, as well as such think tanks as the CATO and American Enterprise Institutes, are based on the market liberal thinking of John Locke, a partial reading of Adam Smith, and more recent libertarian thinkers. Thus, to refer to the policies that give corporations a greater influence over legislation in the areas of health care, energy, and the role-back of environmental protection as examples of conservatism is a problem that has its roots in the failure of universities to expose students to the history of conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke to Wendell Berry, and to the history of liberal thinkers from Locke, Smith, Mill to current libertarians. "The second theme is that the fundamentalist Christians that are part of the president's base of political support hold the view that they know the will of God and that their political mission is to be 'God's regents' until the Second Coming. Their theology, which is not shared by evangelical Christians such as Jim Wallis, leads them to adopt a friend/enemy approach to politics that undermines what remains of the traditions that support a democratic, open, pluralistic society that is able to move forward through compromise and negotiation. I also point out that conserving the traditions of separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, and the separation of power between the main branches of government are not part of the political agenda of these fundamentalists who now number in the millions. As self-identified liberals are not comfortable using the language of conservatism, they continue to emphasize the importance of the autonomous individual and of representing change as progressive in nature. Consequently they are not speaking out on the importance of conserving the traditions that are the basis of our civil liberties and the social justice issues that still need to be addressed. Thus, they are caught in a linguistic double bind. "The third theme is the need for educational reforms that address what students need to know about the nature and importance of the cultural and environmental commons (aspects of the culture and environment that have not been monetized and incorporated into the industrial and consumer-dependent culture) as sites of resistance to the further spread of a market economy that leaves increasing numbers of people vulnerable to the loss of jobs, of health benefits, and of pensions. What remains of the world's diverse cultural and environmental commons (and they still exist across North America-- even in urban areas) hold out the possibilities of a more community-centered existence that involves reliance on intergenerational knowledge and skills that lead to mentoring, mutual support systems, and self-reliant activities that reduce dependence upon a money economy. The book contains a chapter that explains how courses in existing disciplines can be altered in ways that enable students to understand why the importance of the intergenerational knowledge was marginalized by Western philosophers, the history of cultural forces that have contributed to the enclosure of the commons, how different technologies impact the commons, the economics and environmental impact of the cultural commons, and the connections between conserving the linguistic diversity of the cultural commons and conserving habitats and species. The last chapter examines the similarities between the theocracy/market-liberal oriented policies and the characteristics of fascist societies that came to power through a weakened democratic process between the two world wars. While we are not there yet, the forty percent of hard-core Bush supporters, as well as the nearly fifty percent of adults that think that evolution is a liberal-inspired myth suggest that we are further down the slippery slope than many people realize."
Transforming Environmental Education: Making the Cultural and Environmental Commons the Focus of Educational Reform
(Ecojustice, 2006) Bowers, Chet A.
"The book I am asking you to consider has an entirely different focus; with the primary one being the need to integrate environmental education into a more general curriculum that engages students in terms of their daily experiences in their community's cultural and environmental commons, and in terms of providing them the language necessary for articulating what is being lost as more aspects of their commons are enclosed by market forces. If effect, this book is focused on the pedagogical and curricular reforms that are a necessary part of making the renewal of the cultural and environmental commons a central focus of educational reform. The how-to-do-it discussion of fostering the student's communicative competence for articulating the difference between a commons-based experiences and market-consumer based experiences introduces examples that would be appropriate in the early grades as well as how courses at the university level need to be refocused in order to clarify how the development of different disciplines contributed to the marginalization and silences that now characterize most North American's relationships with the commons. The emphasis on pedagogical and curricular reforms are set against a background discussion of how such terms as the environment and environmental education are now being politically contested, as well as against the background of economic globalization, and the rapid rate of global warming and other changes in natural systems' such as the changes in the chemistry of the world's oceans. The book can also be seen as laying out an approach to educational reform that makes the renewing of the cultural and environmental commons the responsibility of classroom teachers and university professors across the disciplines."

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