Climate change: Stakeholders task Africa’s leaders on agroecology


Oilwatch Africa stakeholders have called on African Governments to invest on agroecology as fossil fuel is choking the continent.


The stakeholders in a virtual Annual General Meeting (AGM), said African governments should establish climate-resilient and just recovery models, to defend communities, stop destructive extraction and support agroecology, through their leading visionary organisations in civil society.
The communique signed by 23 Organisations on Thursday said the world economy is just as chaotic as the global political ecology. The crash of oil prices due to Russian-Saudi rivalries and lockdown demand compression, has offered a perverse opportunity for African governments to turn to neo-colonial international financial institutions for loans and financial aid, while leaving healthcare and social support systems in tatters. 


The group call on African governments to support annex Zero, by recognising and incentivising countries, nations, subnational spaces, localities, and territories that keep fossil fuels in the ground. 
“We need to pressure the Global North to pay its climate debt, one aspect of this is our societies’ willingness to leave fossil fuels underground. A down payment on the Global North’s ecological debt to Africa is long overdue, and within this category we include the greenhouse-gas over consumers of South Africa, BRICS countries, and other emerging markets.


“Annex Zero communities should be supported with series of international incentives and recognitions based on solidarity, relevant technological exchanges, and the payment of an ecological debt associated with their suffering due to climate crisis. We think such communities could be paid properly following two models: the proposed “Yasuni” strategy of Northern governments paying the Ecuadoran government money to leave fossil fuels underground, which they would convert to more generous social programmes; and the Basic Income Grant successfully piloted in Otjivero, Namibia, which gives individual households in climate-sensitive sites a monthly cash grant to improve their lives and fend off the damage done by Global-North polluters.” They called on all Africans to resist all forms of neoliberal capitalism that deepen the extractive-export model in the Global South, causing unequal ecological exchange and in the process causing the displacement of millions, destruction of the environment, new dependencies, and recolonization. And that African leaders should promote accountability for the carnage, deaths and ecocide across the continent, due to worsening climate chaos.


“The impact of COVID-19 on the health and livelihoods of countries already adversely affected by fossil fuels exploitation should be assessed. In such sites, it is clear that communities made vulnerable by such industries, for example when people near refineries or oil wells suffer asthma – are also more susceptible to COVID-19. And during national lockdowns, these communities are also more vulnerable than others. When local industries return to post-lockdown operations, the damages associated with pollution due to restarting wells and refineries is even greater than normal.


“A just transitioning away from fossil fuels and equitably phasing out coal, oil and gas extraction should be a fundamental part of the plan for African nations’ economic recovery from COVID19 Pandemic.”

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