The region needs a unified position on the global debate over climate change

By David Jessop

New international fault lines are emerging at the point where concerns about climate change, agriculture, food and energy meet. They run between nations in the developed world, the emerging markets of China, Brazil and India to the smaller nations of the developing world such as those in the Caribbean. They carry with them the threat of hunger and instability and raise much broader questions about the global distribution of wealth.

Despite the urgency, finding internationally agreed solutions to these issues will not be easy as they largely mirror the same differences that are causing the development round at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to come close to stalling. Worse, resolution implies finding answers to questions that have the potential to be highly corrosive to the international system. These include whether there are limits to global economic growth, who decides what these are and by extension whether nations that have the greatest economic power and wealth are willing to cede some of this to others.
These are some of the seemingly unavoidable conclusions to be dawn from listening and reading news in Europe and the US about the future of farming.