The launch of our Behind The Brands campaign and Oxfam’s first campaign action call to Mars, Mondelez International, and Nestle to tackle gender inequality in their cocoa supply chains garnered an immediate response from Mars through a blog post where they describe work they are doing with women in their Sustainable Cocoa Initiative:

“…the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative is designed to work with these communities to help ease social hurdles like poverty, lack of education, and lack of opportunity by addressing the core challenges that farmers face. We recognize the important role women will play in addressing these problems and in moving their communities forward.”

Nestle for its part welcomed their position at the top of the index even as they all but ignored our substantive critique of their policies on women.  Mondelez responded in media reports expressing disappointment that we did not focus solely on areas where everyone already agrees.  None of the companies committed to change any policies to address their current failures.

Olga Rosine Adou is the president of COOPASA, a cocoa cooperative in Agboville, Ivory Coast. She says international companies that buy cocoa from the women she represents could do more to improve their livelihoods. Photo: Peter DiCampo / Oxfam America

The truth is we recognize that all three of these companies have projects that seek to help farmers.  Most of these efforts are done to increase the yields of cocoa farmers, which can lead to better livelihoods.  We also recognize that these projects in some instances have reached out to women to work with them in bettering their communities.  Nevertheless, the projects the companies tout in their public relations are piecemeal at best.

While projects such as these can be a good tool for testing practices and understanding their impacts, they do not represent a holistic approach to supply chain management.  Clear policies that come from the top of a company, and that are communicated to all employees, buyers, and their suppliers throughout the supply chain, can result in more positive impacts for all agricultural producers and workers.  Oxfam is looking for the three companies to improve their policies across their cocoa supply chains so that all women working within them can benefit from increased training programs, cooperative membership, access to agricultural inputs, and living wages.

Together Mars, Mondelez, and Nestle control more than 40% of the global chocolate market, purchase nearly one third of the world’s harvested cocoa and net more than $45 billion a year in confectionary sales.  They have the power to influence suppliers, governments, and certification bodies and they can influence policy shifts and practices in the sector.

While women increasingly occupy positions of power in food and beverage company headquarters and are frequently the targets of marketing campaigns, women working in food companies’ supply chains in developing countries continue to be denied similar advances in wealth, status, or opportunity. For example:

• The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that women small-scale farmers in Africa own just 1 percent of agricultural land, receive only 7 percent of extension services, and benefit from less than 10 percent of agricultural credit is offered to women.
• As much of 60 percent of the global agricultural workforce is made up of women who produce everything from corn to tomatoes, vanilla to tea.

Overcoming gender discrimination could be the most important thing that can be done to cultivate equitable and sustainable growth.  As The Economist reported back in 2006, the increase in employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global growth than has the economic emergence of China.

While speaking to women cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast last month, I heard time and again that being a cocoa farmer for women was simply harder than it was for men because they lacked some of the support that men were getting.  Olga Rosine Adou is a rare entity in the Ivory Coast as a woman who is President of a cocoa cooperative in Agboville.  Olga told us that were many things she could use from the international chocolate companies that buy cocoa in the Ivory Coast to make the jobs of the women farmers she represents more efficient and remunerative.

“[T]here are many things we want. For example, we want to be trained, and taught about what steps to take to do it well. We also need tools and equipment, (machetes, motos, buckets, etc.) to get the work done. If we had those things, it’d be easier. We also need pesticides and fertilizers to treat our farms.”

Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign sets out three clear steps for companies like Mars, Mondelez and Nestle to address women’s unfair treatment comprehensively. The three companies have made significant commitments to source certified cocoa and have worked on projects through a number of stakeholder initiatives demonstrating the companies’ willingness to engage and the possibility of dealing collectively with complex issues. But, it’s now time to address women’s rights in the same fashion.

It is plain for all to see that women who grow food companies’ raw ingredients are facing hunger and unfair pay. But so far none of the companies has stepped up to lead the way.  Food companies know about these inequities. Behind the Brands is telling them it’s time to deal with them systematically.

Yesterday Oxfam released the Behind the Brands Report and Scorecard aimed at shedding light on the global food system and its massive social and environmental footprint. The food system employs one billion workers (or a third of the global work force), uses 70% of the world’s fresh water, emits close to 30% of all greenhouse gases, and sources from hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, many living on the edge of survival. Oxfam’s campaign is aimed at giving consumers and investors a little more power to influence the companies controlling that system.

The Scorecard is built on an interactive web platform, allowing anyone to trace their favorite products and brands back to the parent company. On the site, the Scorecard ranks the top ten largest food and beverage companies (the “Big 10”) by evaluating the companies’ policies, commitments, and suppliers. People can dig deeper into the scoring of a specific company across seven themes relating to poverty and their supply chains: smallholder farmers, workers, women, land, water, climate change and transparency. The site enables people to then send messages about the issues most important to them directly to the companies.

A scorecard of this nature is sure to provoke pushback, and here are a few things we have heard or anticipate hearing from company executives:

First, the Big 10 will point the finger at other powerful actors in the food system such as governments, retailers, traders, etc. Oxfam also works to hold these actors accountable. (See our prior report on the big traders.) But the major food and beverage companies exert enormous influence, particularly with respect to certain commodities. The food system can be roughly illustrated below, with billions of consumers at one end, 1.5 billion farmers at the other, and a small group of companies in the middle. We estimate that 500 companies control 70% of that food system. In some sectors as in cocoa, three companies, Nestle, Mondelez and Mars, purchase 30% of the global cocoa supply. We also know that these companies benefit from having great influence through their marketing, trade groups, public sector and business contacts—well beyond their particular market share. Ultimately, we chose to target the Big 10 since they serve as the critical bridge between consumers and the wider system.

Companies will also lament that we don’t give them sufficient credit for good work on the ground. There is merit to that critique. We know of good projects and we’ve even worked with companies on some of them. However, we couldn’t possibly measure all the projects across 14 commodities in the developing world, and that wasn’t our intention. These projects get plenty of visibility already. They benefit from the vast corporate marketing prowess of the major brands and we will highlight some of effective projects on our platform.

Our Scorecard asks the bigger questions: Are companies acknowledging the full range of their impacts? Are they measuring and reporting on those impacts? Are they committing to basic norms and standards? And are they using their influence and supplier codes to push those commitments down through their supply chains? Those are the building blocks for addressing these issues comprehensively. No company should be able to claim it is responsible if it doesn’t acknowledge the problem of land grabs, or assess discrimination against women, or disclose its major suppliers, no matter how many demonstration projects it has.

The flip side of our high level focus is that the Scorecard doesn’t examine particular scandals either. Coca Cola scores better than most among the companies on worker rights, despite a long-standing campaign (“Killer Coke”) for the murders of union organizers at a bottling plant in Colombia. Oxfam considers a company’s public commitments, transparency, and supplier codes as good proxies for practice, but we also recognize the limitations. The Behind the Brand Campaign offers a platform to raise both good and bad practices on the ground, and we will be digging in to certain Scorecard themes and company conduct over the course of the Campaign, starting with cocoa and gender.

Finally, companies (or more likely stakeholders) may complain that we are only looking at one end of the supply chain. We do in fact cover some issues more broadly, transparency and greenhouse gas emissions for example. But, we acknowledge that there is plenty more to consider with these brands, starting with nutrition and obesity. If anyone questions the capacity for mendacity of major food brands, the scathing New York Times cover article last week on the “hyper-engineered, savagely marketed, additive-creating battle for American ‘stomach share’” should put those doubts to rest. We simply weren’t able to tackle all of that in one Scorecard, but see this initiative as filling an important piece of the puzzle.

The Big 10 have already shown that they are willing and able to address complex issues, particularly when they see a business case or feel sufficient pressure. Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign is all about both sides of that—highlighting the bottom line and strengthening the consumer, investor, and public constituencies who bring the heat.

Vicky Rateau is the GROW Campaign Manager at Oxfam America.

As a society, we get upset by food companies processing horsemeat to sell to us in the grocery store.  It’s troubling to customers; some don’t like the idea of not knowing what’s in our food.

Could we extend that same concern to the people who grow the food that end up in our refrigerators and cupboards? Could we get as enraged that food companies are looking the other way from land grabs in developing countries as families lose their farms or access to water?

There’s a range of injustices and violations that are often included in food products.

Oxfam’s GROW campaign is kicking off a new initiative today, Behind the Brands, to rank the policies of big food companies on important issues like treatment of workers and farmers, equality for women, land, clean water, climate change, and transparency. Oxfam has spent over a year pulling information together through research and engagement with food companies, so that for the first time, people will be able to see what the goes on behind products like M&Ms and Oreos. The main report contains a Scorecard that ranks the top 10 food companies, based on nearly 3000 data points that touch on issues rarely considered in mainstream sustainability ratings.  Oxfam plans to push hard for improvements in coming years, with campaigns planned in more than 12 countries, including the US, Mexico, Brazil, China and countries across Europe, which are major markets for these companies.

Behind the Brands complements the other parts of the GROW campaign (now in more than 45 countries) where Oxfam is focused on encouraging responsible government action on food and agriculture, as well as consumer behavior.  But governments and consumers aren’t enough. The big food companies with huge supply chains and enormous market power must also be part of the solution. They can help address the range of social and environmental challenges with food supply chains today. Ultimately the private sector’s share of the responsibility for basic human development based on ethical policy decisions should not be left to the competing forces of the marketplace.

The ten companies examined in Behind the Brands have aggressive sustainability efforts in some corners of the world, for some commodities, and in some sectors on sustainability issues. As the ten largest food companies, they should. But they have the ability to do more. Their supply chains employ millions of people in developing countries who grow and produce their products. They have the power to help tackle hunger, inequality, and vulnerability for the world’s poorest people. And at minimum, we agree they shouldn’t look the other way if land and water are being taken to grow the ingredients for their products, or if women are paid less than men for the same work.

Food companies know that women are the target market for their advertising; they put women front and center in their ads because in most households, women make the key buying decisions. But the same food companies often neglect the women who are the core producers of food products. And so, our first campaign action is focused on three of the top 10—Mars, Mondelez (formerly Kraft), and Nestle—for their failure to address inequality faced by women who grow cocoa used in their chocolate products.

No brand is too big to listen to its customers. We know consumers already think hard about the food they buy and want their purchases to make a difference or help others. This campaign is about showing big food companies that they can—and must—improve their policies and practices, and that as consumers we care.

We hope others will join us. In the comments, show us how you’re helping to spread the word.

***

Over the next few weeks, Oxfam America’s Politics of Poverty blog will feature a series of posts that cover each of the Scorecard’s seven themes: workers, farmers, women, land, water, climate and transparency. Stay tuned!

Paul O’Brien is the Vice President for Policy and Campaigns at Oxfam America.

On a Friday afternoon in 2004, I was sitting on a Hill looking out over downtown Kabul.  The city was blanketed in smog with mountains rising in the backdrop.

Smog over Kabul. Photo courtesy of the Geo-Images Project http://bit.ly/VKijKQ

“Beautiful,” my Afghan friend said.

“Except for the smog,” I said.  “Our daughters are down there breathing that air.”

“The smog is beautiful too,” he said, “and they will survive. Three years ago, there were no cars in Kabul.  Today, we have your problem—too many cars.  It’s a better problem to have.”

Climate change activism has a challenge.  How do we tell a new story that works globally in our multi-polar, hungry world?

I just spent a few days thinking about this very question at a Climate Gathering in Ireland.  While the discussion critically lacked southern voices, it was a still a useful gathering of North American and European thinkers, activists, and artists trying to find new ways to mobilize a new conversation on climate.

I was unnerved when the meeting started by showing us the “darkening” room, or the place we were to go to voice frustrations.  It was well populated in the beginning sessions.  Early on I sensed that our perpetual brinkmanship may be politically bankrupt in the North.  The drumbeats of “failed consciousness” and “impending catastrophe” have become white noise for too many people.  We convince ourselves that words like “warming” and “change” will terrify millions, when we know in our hearts that our Southern allies want change more than anything.  We need a new story that comes not from failure, but the possibility of victory, not stasis but movement.

We played around with this notion; we are in a new age of enlightenment.  Once again in human history, our thinkers, activists, artists and benefactors—those guiding our private conversations—are outpacing our politicians and public conversations.  Art, technology, economics, and science are transforming not just what we can have, but what we want, or what “the good life” means.  For the first time ever, “global consciousness”—a key to solving uniquely global problems—is possible.

It’s a matter of time before politicians seek to line up incentives so that our planet wins from our innovation and endeavor.  Regulation will become our friend, and time is not our enemy.  What was unthinkable in the United States 10 years ago—a President mocking climate deniers, a global social media discussion on this issue, and locally-grown organic food in most communities, the simple life commercialized—is already happening.  Changing weather patterns don’t just insist on our attention, they are getting it and we are acting.

Of course, none of this is happening quickly enough or deeply enough for millions of people facing true crises today of hunger, forced migration, and loss of livelihoods.  Their stories can and must be told everywhere.  But if modern movement building requires more agency from Southern and Northern activists, we need more ways to mobilize people than the hope of individual outrage at our collective failure.

If climate change activism needs to become more ecumenical to be popular, it may need a more promiscuous sensibility.  It cannot always be so needy and judgmental.  Of course we must harness human “compassion,” but let’s not forget “force” and “laughter.”  Why not embrace “competition” as well as “collaboration”? How about “playfulness” as well as “responsibility”?  More people want to engage, but they don’t all want to weave every strand of their life together to do something good.  Many would engage in mindless random acts of political power if they knew something useful would happen as a consequence.  They may be responsible for the problem and may need to take responsibility, but they don’t want to be reminded of it all the time.

As we searched for an enlightenment story that cut across all our disciplines, the most resilient one was “home.”  I liked it. It works locally (the hearth), nationally (homeland) and globally (planet).  It evokes responsibility and protection.  It brings forth a different kind of voice and tone in the conversation.

Smog over Kabul. Photo courtesy Building Markets blog http://bit.ly/omDieg

When we talked of home, those who liked the big stage (most often men) shut up, while quieter voices (often women) spoke up and out.

I worry though that a story of home won’t bring in different voices, so much as convince the converted to stay the course. And that’s not enough.  Climate change needs stories of adventure and victory too—all sorts of heroes.

I was able to bring my daughter home from Kabul.  My friend and his daughter still live in a kerosene-heated home, darkening with dirty diesel every day.  They want life to keep changing more, not less.  Our enlightenment, our story of home, has to work for us both.

A few weeks before Oxfam’s GROW Campaign launched in 2011, I went up to New York with our president Ray Offenheiser and head of our policy (and lead Poindexter) Gawain Kripke to meet with a handful of journalists. We wanted to give them a sneak peek at what we had planned.

One of our first stops was to sit down with Sandy Keenan, Environment Editor at the New York Times, and two key reporters on the Environment Desk: Elisabeth Rosenthal and Justin Gillis. We had a long conversation about the issues of GROW and the emerging trends that we were seeing around the world.

Cracked, dry earth outside Magartu Baleha's home near East Shewa, Ethiopia. Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

They asked difficult questions, probed the soft spots of our research, and challenged us to back up our point of view with credible evidence. It was a good conversation, one clearly grounded in knowledge and experience with the immense and complex challenges that come with trying to feed a growing population without breaking the planet. This is not always the experience one has when talking to reporters. In fact it was utterly unique. No other outlet had this depth of knowledge actually backed up by the resources and mandate to reach a mainstream audience.

So it is with great disappointment that I read today that the “paper of record” is dismantling its environment desk, reassigning the reporters and editors to other beats. The change, they say, is not prompted by budgetary pressures but what Inside Climate News calls “the shifting interdisciplinary landscape of news reporting.”

Times managing editor for news operations told ICN that environmental stories are, “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects. They are more complex. We need to have people working on the different desks that can cover different parts of the story.”

That’s all well and good but it is hard to see this move as anything but an unmitigated disaster for people who care about how the challenges facing our environment impact our lives. The Times environmental coverage is heads and shoulders above what any other mainstream outlet in the US is offering. It is literally without comparison in its quality and quantity. Certainly there are good reporters outside the confines of the Times. Most other outlets have offered shrinking coverage of the political and policy decisions that impact our planet. The Times, led by its Environment Desk, has continued to push the conversation forward on a range of issues.

In theory, this tradition could continue without the benefit of a dedicated team. But color me skeptical. In my experience the issues reporters choose to pay attention to, and the lens through which they approach their coverage, is heavily shaped by the beat to which they are assigned. The title a reporter has on their business card can play a major role in determining what gets written and what does not.

It is certainly true that environmental issues are business issues. They’re national political issues. They’re local issues. But try getting a national political reporter to write a nuanced and thoroughly reported article about the threat climate change is posing to food systems. Try getting a business reporter to write about the ways in which American and European biofuels policies are influencing the ability of poor Guatemalans to get enough to eat. I wish you good luck.

The Times has been a leader in environmental coverage because it has shown a commitment to covering the issue via the Environment Desk. We can only hope that the desk’s closure does not turn out as bad as it seems for environmental coverage.

David Waskow is Oxfam America’s climate change program director.

In a year of crippling droughts around the world—from West Africa to the US Midwest—the outcome at the major UN climate negotiation in Doha, Qatar, was itself an unfortunate drought of climate action.

This was a paradoxical COP—both a stepping stone and a cliff-hanger—with developing countries hanging from the finance cliff by their fingertips.  Even though several European countries pledged climate finance for the upcoming 2013-15 period, developed countries were unwilling to commit collectively to any funding level for the upcoming period or clarity about how they’ll ramp up toward the international goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020.

The United States, arguing that it was constrained by the fiscal cliff budget negotiations, refused even to commit to maintain the funding level of the past three years of ‘fast start’ climate finance agreed during the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. All the final text says is that developed countries are “encouraged” to maintain fast start levels. Meanwhile, there was little done at Doha to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Qumrunnessa Nazly from Bangladesh held an empty basket amidst a field of dead corn set in front of the glittering Doha skyline to demonstrate the grave impact of a changing climate on food supply and food prices, and the crucial importance of the UN climate change negotiations in providing a solution. Richard Casson/Oxfam.

A few limited but hopeful elements in the Doha outcome: an agreement to convene a high-level dialogue on climate finance at the next COP in 2013; an agreement to work this coming year to develop an international mechanism to address “loss and damage,” the effects of climate change that cannot be adapted to; formal agreement on how some countries, particularly the European Union and Australia, will continue the Kyoto Protocol until 2020; and agreement on the process for negotiating the planned 2015 comprehensive climate agreement that will take effect in 2020.

The US made a verbal commitment to work for climate finance in Congress this coming year and try to continue the finance at current levels. (Todd Stern, the US special climate envoy said that “we have every intention to continue to press forward with funding of that same kind of level, to the greatest extent that we can.”)

But beyond the minimalist outcomes agreed in the texts, one of the most noteworthy outcomes at Doha was the growing strength, breadth, and depth of engagement and collaboration by civil society organizations. A press conference last week demonstrated this growing collaboration:  Oxfam, WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, and ActionAid, with the chairs of the Least Developed Country and Africa negotiating groups, stood together to say that the climate talks were failing to produce meaningful change and that governments needed to shift gears dramatically.  Representing a range of perspectives, their joint statement was not just a marriage of tactical convenience—it demonstrates a real confluence around jointly shared objectives of equity and sustainability, with climate issues a central, though hardly the sole, issue.

Perhaps most important, advocates are shifting focus toward the national and local levels and bridging or even bypassing the old divides between development and environmental agendas. There’s a strong belief that this increased energy and action will eventually also flow upward back into the global level process. And home-grown advocacy on climate change is already blossoming in many developing countries. This came home for me while working with developing country partners from Nepal, Philippines, Uganda, and Zambia, partners in a new initiative to press for adaptation finance that’s accountable at the local level. They have been building strong civil society networks over the past several years and are pressing effectively for national level policy change, as well as engaging the international process.  For these groups and many others in developing countries, building advocacy from the ground up and seeing past environment-development divides are self-evident truths.

The pump is primed to water our advocacy from these sources. But there’s also an immediate question about the focus of our advocacy agenda in the US—especially on the climate finance front in coming months. We must work for robust levels of climate funding at least at the level of the past several years, joined to a public recommitment by the administration to the President’s Global Climate Change Initiative.  And we must seize opportunities to push forward on innovative sources of finance, such as a mechanism for international aviation that can limit emissions while producing financial resources.

Doha was parched—but there are oases on the horizon that we can and must move towards.

This update by David Waskow, climate change program director, comes from Doha the morning of December 7, 2012.

We’re heading into the final hours of what has been a paradoxical COP. On the one hand, it’s a transitional COP, a stepping stone for the process launched last year that’s supposed to lead to a comprehensive climate agreement in 2015. On the other hand, it’s a cliffhanger COP because the thee year Fast Start climate finance period that developed countries agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009 is coming to an end in several weeks and developing countries are uncertain about what happens next with finance to help them build climate resilience. As Oxfam has said, we’re facing a climate fiscal cliff.

The result has been a disappointing COP so far—with only limited  progress on the new agreement, along with a serious stalemate on the finance issues. Developing countries are seeking a Doha decision that developed countries will maintain their fast start finance levels and begin to ramp up the funding levels. But despite some pledges of finance by several European counties, there has been very little progress on agreeing to finance commitments here.

As a result, the lack of finance assurances may stymie movement toward the 2015 deal because developing countries want more assurances on finance before they move fully forward. The final hours will be telling. Among other things, will the US agree to maintain the fast start levels of finance over the next three years (essentially $10 billion per year from all developed countries)?

The US did take one important step here in Doha—to recognize the importance of opening a dialogue on some key issues of equity in the negotiations, especially around the level of emissions reductions that different countries would undertake. There does have to be a serious conversation about this, and hopefully the US will engage.

Many negotiators from other countries came to Doha more optimistic about a US administration that had just won reelection. Many are again skeptical as the US continues to stick with positions from before. We’ve been stressing the opportunity the President has to act more assertiveness internationally after his reelection and significantly increased climate awareness after Sandy and this past summer’s drought. The final hours of the negotiations will provide telling answers as to how that will play out.

In late October, a week before Hurricane Sandy arrived on the East Coast of the US, I entered a maelstrom of food and people in the scenic region of Italy at the southern foot of the Alps. It was the Terra Madre event in Turin, northern Italy, the biennial occasion that draws over 200,000 people from around the world to celebrate and discuss food production, preparation and enjoyment. And next Monday is Terra Madre Day, a day to celebrate our locally grown and produced food.

Carlo Petrini established both Slow Food and Terra Madre “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”[1] At the opening ceremony, the sage of the Slow Food movement declared that “caring for food means caring for all living beings.” And after long applause, Petrini added that promoting the dignity, well-being, happiness and community means taking a “political approach.”

African garden display at Terra Madre. Photo: Jim French

I attended the October event as an Oxfam America delegate upon invitation of Slow Food USA. During the opening event, sitting by my side was Frederick Msiska, a farmer from Malawi. He coordinated a Slow Food Garden Project in his country and had come to help construct an amazing 400 square meter African garden in the Oval pavilion at Terra Madre. Showcasing the vast variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and medicinal plants that grow on the continent, the garden was a visual symbol of the cultural communities working to support a diverse and healthy food system. It also expressed a political idea: the value in investing in and empowering small scale producers to help support a well-fed, fair, and sustainable planet.

Esther Jerome and Marianna Yatsyshina at Terra Madre. Photo: Giorgio Gori

Frederick Msiksa was joined by hundreds of small farmers from developing nations. These included Tanzanian Food Hero, Esther Jerome, and, Grow Method honoree from Siberia Marianna Yatsyshina. these small-scale producers represented the ideal of what can happen when people are given the means and resources to grow, prepare and market food. But they also spoke about the injustice that occurs when companies, governments or wealthy investors buy up or seize land and displace people, or when native fisheries are decimated by industrial operations, or when indigenous practices and skills are neglected and lost.

The theme of this Terra Madre: “Good, clean, fair.” seemed to me like a good fit with the GROW Campaign triad of Food, Justice, Planet. Slow Food’s broad global network is more often associated with the pleasure of preparing and consuming good food rather than justice issues.But, in a world now facing climate change, conflict over land and water, and the need to meet the world demand for food while eradicating hunger and safeguarding the environment, the common ground of Oxfam and Slow Food is growing.

A well-fed world is one that must cultivate justice and sustainability and produce nutritious and good tasting food.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, we are experiencing a potential shift in the political tides on climate change. Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama Thursday, citing climate change, thrust climate issues into the political debate. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy have also made strong statements calling climate change a reality and calling for more preparedness and reforms in its wake. The media is becoming more willing to connect the dots and call a spade a spade.

Let’s not forget that climate change has ushered in a “new normal” for many communities around the world. Up and down the east coast, many Americans are experiencing the same sense of helplessness, and maybe some level of solidarity with people who are more vulnerable to extreme weather events than those of us who have the resources to cope and institutions able to support us through crisis. The startling images of Sandy remind us of how these crises must feel in places without the kind of support we are able to provide our fellow Americans. Places like Bangladesh, a least developed country with most of its population living in poverty, the majority living in low-lying areas highly vulnerable to floods, storms, and saltwater intrusion. Let’s not forget that Hurricane Sandy itself claimed more than 50 lives in Haiti where cholera is an acute public health threat and communities are still recovering from the earthquake that devastated that country less than two years ago.

So we should seize this temporary moment of realization about the threats all of us face to push forward towards a global response to climate change to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions levels and to direct resources those who need it most to build their preparedness. With the US election tomorrow and the next round of UN climate negotiations happening later this month, we have an opportunity to usher in a new political dynamic on this issue. The onus is now on the American public to hold our political leaders accountable for demonstrating new and sustained leadership on this global crisis. We owe it to the people who lost their lives in this awful storm, and to the estimated 400,000 people who lose their lives every year due to climate-related disasters.

Somalia

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Pastoralists and their camels on the road in southern Somalia. Photo by Njoroge/Oxfam

For the last few weeks, whenever I could get a quiet moment, I’ve been trying to read and think about resilience. It seems like the whole development and humanitarian sector is rapturous about resilience. And already, there’s a bit of backlash.

A lot of smart people are taking up the theme, and I think we should. As a frame for thinking about policy and programming, I think there’s a lot of utility in it.  One of the primary innovations of a focus on resilience is that it presumes an unstable and adverse external environment. This is a big advantage because, actually, reality presents a lot of unstable and adverse situations for poor people. My colleague Gina points out that presuming a stable environment is a big weakness of other frameworks, for example the sustainable livelihoods approach, which is one of the most important tools in development practice.

But if resilience has advantages, there must also be some disadvantages and cautions.

One of the most important is to define resilience in a way that’s useful—which is to say that excludes some things as NOT resilience. This is a big problem in the field right now, where it feels like some people are simply redrafting existing plans to include resilience as a goal or an outcome. In that case, maybe we were building resilience all along? If building resilience is something, then it can’t be everything. If it’s everything, then it’s actually not a thing.

So—a lot of my thinking lately has been to try to create a useful, exclusionary definition of resilience that has operational and policy value. To do this, I’ve been trying to disentangle some issues around resilience.  Here goes:

1.Resilience of what? What are we concerned with? The individual, the household, the village, the community, the region, the country, a financial system, a supply-chain, a farming system, an institution? It matters. If you prioritize one, you are probably undermining others. This isn’t absolutely true: building resilience of some component units can contribute to the resilience of larger units. But the opposite can be true also. So which one is important? How do we select? As a rights-based organization, I have to think that Oxfam would prioritize the resilience of individuals. Or maybe households. Possibly villages. But I’m not totally sure.

2. Resilience is an attribute not a form of support. I think resilience is a characteristic of the individual (or household or community, see item #1 above). Resilience might be improved through outside intervention; building assets, reducing risk exposure, preparing response. But outside intervention during or after a shock is not resilience—it’s assistance. Providing a robust safety net for people when they experience shocks is a good and important thing to do. But it is not building the resilience of beneficiaries and is a different species altogether than resilience-building. On the other hand, you might argue that a robust safety net program builds the resilience of a country to shocks. But not the beneficiaries, unless there’s a program of DRR or asset building that is part of the assistance.

3. Is resilience multi-dimensional or not? Can one build resilience against a variety of shocks at once? It seems to me that it’s best not to presume that resilience to one form of shock—let’s say a drought—implies resilience to another—say an earthquake or economic crisis. One might try to address them together, but the intervention probably needs to have distinctive strategies for each. Or no? Some forms of resilience assets—like having a significant cash reserve or a diversified household livelihood—seem to help build resilience across many potential hazards. When we think about resilience, should we organize around the individual’s (or other unit, see #1 above) resilience to various potential shocks? Or should we organize ourselves around each possible hazard and think about how to improve resilience each in turn; to drought, to earthquakes, to currency inflation, etc.?  Intuitively, we probably want to do the former, but it might not be an effective way to organize action and allocate resources.

4. Shocks v. stresses. Does resilience address both shocks and stress? A shock is an idiosyncratic event. A stress in a longer-term condition. Some materials can absorb stresses better than shocks; quantum of energy, applied in an instant, will break an iron rod. The same amount of energy applied over an hour has no effect. But maybe I’m making a distinction without a difference? Personally, I think resilience is about response to shocks. Using climate change as an example, long-term trends like rising sea levels and hotter temperatures would create a stress and require adaptation. But shorter-term events like hurricanes and droughts are shocks that test resilience.  They’re clearly related in their genesis, but different in their impacts and response strategy? Or am I wrong?

5. Resilience v. resourcefulness? In usage, these terms can seem interchangeable. “The Somali pastoralists are very resourceful; they find water even in the midst of a drought.” Ironically, we often use the word “resourceful” to describe people without resources. You wouldn’t call a rich family resourceful—because, indeed, they are full of resources. But you call a poor family resourceful when they send their kids to college by hook or by crook, i.e. DESPITE a lack of resources. Observers wonder at the “resourcefulness” of others largely because they don’t understand the real access and control over resources that they have. So seeing someone as “resourceful” probably reflect the ignorance of the observer more than the actual characteristics of the observed. Is there something similar in resilience? Do we understand an individual/household/community as resilient only because we are so ignorant of its assets and strategies that we don’t understand how shocks are accommodated?

6. Resilience is a floor. I think resilience is—and should be—a pretty sad goal. That is, if a definition of resilience is rigorous, it should set a baseline of survival; a floor, but not a ceiling. Resilience is the capacity to resist, withstand, and recover from shocks. That doesn’t mean becoming happy, healthy, or rich. Just getting through it and back to normal. Really, that’s aiming pretty low. And our hopes and aspirations for one another are a lot higher than that. But if we are honest, even resilience is often beyond our reach. Much of the energy behind the new fad of resilience is coming from the humanitarian response community. They are recognizing that the mismatch between the response capacity and the need for assistance is growing wider. Motivated as much by frustration as by a positive vision, they are saying we need a new paradigm. We can’t keep responding to droughts in the same way; we have to build up the resilience of communities to withstand them. My humanitarian colleague points out that part of the frustration is that the livelihoods and development programmers have ignored shocks and resilience, so the humanitarians end up having to pick up the pieces.

More thoughts soon.