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Group co-secretary Clare Baker on 6 July delivered a petition with 2143 signatories to Vicky Ford, Euro MP for the East of England, calling on her to vote for strong new rules to tackle financial speculation on food.Vicky Ford MEP is an alternate member of a key committee in the European parliament that will vote on financial reforms which could prevent financial speculation by banks and hedge funds driving up food prices.

The average UK household’s annual grocery bill has risen by £132 in the past year. In developing countries, where people typically spend 50 to 90 per cent of their incomes on food, steep price hikes in recent years have driven millions of people into hunger and poverty.

Campaigners from the Cambridge World Development Movement group are calling on Vicky Ford MEP to support the European plans to tackle food speculation, as intense lobbying by the financial sector is threatening to derail the new regulations.

Vicky Ford MEP is in a key position to tackle the problem by using her vote next week to back strong new rules which will benefit food consumers everywhere. Financial speculation benefits nobody except a few wealthy bankers. But it is fuelling high food prices, putting pressure on squeezed family budgets, and forcing millions of people into hunger worldwide. We are delivering a message from thousands of people to say that we need tough new rules to curb food speculation. Food is essential for human survival, and should not be subject to financial gambling.

We’ve since heard that the vote, which was to have taken place on 9-10 July, has been postponed to September.   But there was no harm in getting WDM’s point across now!

 

 

Cambridge WDM has a new group banner!  Old banner gave us good service over many years, but it showed our old web address and was starting to get tatty.  New banner shows who we are, and leaves web address and other contact details to us.  Thanks to WDM office for kindly supporting the production of this.

Banner’s first outing was Cambridge Amnesty’s 16 June event in support of a petition for a solid arms trade treaty.  Group members stood shoulder to shoulder with Amnesty and Julian Huppert MP on this one — and then disappeared into the crowd on WDM biz in the run-up to the Rio+20 conference.  The conference claimed to be about a ‘green economy’.  but, as WDM explains, there was a risk that’d mean no more than monetising nature.  The action cards called on MPs to make sure that Nick Clegg travelled to the conference with better ideas than that.

We worked the Market Square and Petty Cury, and came back an hour later with 20-30 cards signed and ready for dispatch, to more than one MP.

For what happened at Rio+20, see WDM’s blog.

These are from Danny’s book The no-nonsense guide to climate change (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2010).

1.  Build the movement.  “We need as many people as possible to get switched on, clued up and active”, says Danny.  Well, you’re reading this, and Cambridge WDM gathers in members’ homes and lays on public actions, and national WDM keeps us motivated and informed.

2.  Stop the worst stuff: get off the coal train, shut down the tar sands and end the biofuel boom.

3.  Get the alternatives rolling. “Are there opportunities to pressure or shame your local government to put more sustainable solutions in place?”

4.  Reclaim democracy and clean up politics.  “This is a great opportunity to make links with other non-climate campaigners.”  At the 30 January meeting, Danny held the attention of people from groups of all kinds.  The event itself was a co-production between Cambridge WDM and Cambridge Carbon Footprint.  We look forward to working together again.

5.  Fight the growth myth.  The growth being that of Gross Domestic Product.

6.  Switch off the carbon tap.  This is calling for tighter regulation and grassroots action to rein in polluting companies.

7.  Stick a spanner in consumer culture.  With art and music and creative writing and performance of all kinds!

8.  Link to other local campaigns. Yes, this does need saying more than once.

9.  Pick a fight.

10.  Support struggles on the climate frontline.  This has always been WDM’s way.

A bit different, those ten,  from lifestyle recommendations about taps and insulation and cycling.  But Danny’s book is like that.  As he says in the introduction, “Climate change isn’t just a technical issue to do with putting the wrong amount of certain gases into the air. It’s tangled up with politics, lifestyles, economics, power structures, culture and belief.  That is why it’s proving so difficult to solve, and also why it’s simultaneously disastrous, frustrating, fascinating, heart-breaking , and utterly relevant to everyone in the world.”

Were you there when Danny came and addressed us on 30 January?  We didn’t record the proceedings, and we wouldn’t have got very far — a lot of it was quiz.  But you’ll get the flavour from the book well enough — and a lot of science, too, made intelligible to non-scientists like me.  Buy it!

 

 

Author / activist / slam poet Danny Chivers promoted his book  The no-nonsense guide to climate change on Monday 30 January, at Friends’ Meeting House, Jesus Lane, in a workshop entitled ‘Some good news for a (climate) change’.

Danny was one of six people due to be tried in January 2011 for planning to invade Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station.  That case collapsed after revelations about undercover police officer Mark Kennedy.  The book, published by _New Internationalist_, is a pocket guide to the climate issue, using friendly, jargon-free language (along with a smattering of humour, poetry and unusual analogies) to explain the latest science, politics, solutions, technologies, barriers, activism, and where we go from here.

And, he explained, his notes for the talk were printed on backs of the prosecution papers that had been served on him in connection with the trial.

Here’s Sarah Reader’s slide presentation about the Durban climate talks, as given to our group meeting on 16 November.   And let’s link to Murray Worthy’s account of the spectacular failure that Durban actually delivered.

Members leafleted passers-by and gathered petition signatures against the channelling of climate funding via the World Bank.

World Bank loans to help poor countries cope with climate change are creating new debt for them. And around a third of the money disbursed in this way is subsidising corporate profits rather than meeting local needs. The World Bank’s acting like a loan shark. The UK needs to find other outlets for climate finance.

WDM’s campaign for climate justice is linked to a week of action to precede the United Nations climate talks in Durban, due to take place 28 November – 9 December.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures by Clare Baker