DEVELOPMENT

 

PUT FARMING FIRST.

The increasing emphasis on subsistence  farming  has led to several contradictory trends in the last 10 years.

First, a decline in global commodity trading.

Second, the development of sustainable agriculture.

Third, a global land grab by cash rich countries.

Fourth, increasing pressure on water resources.

Since the economic meltdown of the USA and the EU following the collapse of banking, and the mortgage crisis, in 2008/09, there has been an increasing demand to put ‘farming first’: to return to urban farms, and allotments and to abandone the global trade of staple foods. There has been an increasing number of community markets selling locally grown produce. This can be seen as a return to ‘subsistence farming’.
'Development' must include everyone, and a sustainable future for the 100% of the world’s population is a ‘subsistence’ future, made easier by the provision of modern technology e.g solar energy, water purification, drugs to cure diseases. Profits should have social objectives, and be spent for the benefits of local communities in the form of health care, sanitation, education, not for the luxuries of the plutocracy.
Without sustainable agriculture, sustainable development in Africa will remain a dream, argues Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, of Farming First. A top priority of the UN is to halve the number of people in the world experiencing poverty and hunger. While several countries have made progress in this area (China alone has lifted more than 175 million of its people above the poverty line), many other countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, still face the same hunger and poverty levels that they experienced 20 years ago. Up to 300 million Africans are facing chronic hunger.
So what can Africans do to put food on the table and money in their pockets? The answer is simple – invest in agriculture. After decades of stagnation in agricultural yields and little investment in rural economies, African countries are beginning to prioritise the development of agricultural production and markets. Rural development and agricultural productivity improvement now feature prominently on the agenda of national governments.
Continent-wide plans and investments, through programmes under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Research into Use (RIU) and the Alliance for Commodity Trade in East
and Southern Africa (ACTESA) and many others are encouraging.
With the majority of African governments spending on average less than 5% of total national budgets on agriculture, one of CAADP's key objectives is to increase this to 10%, with the target of raising agricultural productivity by at least 6% per annum. Achieving Africa's agricultural growth requires massive investments from the global community and the on-going global financial crisis poses a threat to Africa's efforts.
Over the past generation, agriculture and farmers have been sidelined in international policy circles. During this time, agriculture's share of total aid has dropped from 17% to 3% of total spend. As a result, productivity is low. While total aid to sub-Saharan Africa remained stable during the 1990s, the proportion allocated to agriculture declined year on year. Aid to agriculture in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) member states declined as a proportion of total aid from 20% in the early 1980s to 8% by 2000. If poverty in Africa is to be reduced, aid to agriculture must be increased substantially and made to work more effectively.
The G8 agriculture ministers in discussions of the world food emergency, have done well to recognise the role agriculture plays in the success of a broader development agenda.  The G8 ministers have endorsed CAADP as an excellent plan of what is needed to achieve food security. It is time we realised that there can be no sustainable development without sustainable agriculture. For Africa to develop sustainable food policies, partnerships are key. The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) has joined forces with international groups from the science and technology, farming, and private sector communities to endorse a plan called - Farming First  

among global policymakers. Farming First calls on world leaders to take action by developing a locally sustainable value chain for global agriculture. It emphasises the need for knowledge networks and policies centred on helping subsistence farmers to become small-scale entrepreneurs, and it proposes six interlinked imperatives for sustainable agriculture:
safeguarding natural resources,
sharing knowledge,
building local access,
protecting harvests,
enabling access to markets
and prioritising research imperatives.
Implementation of programmes under CAADP is critical for reducing hunger and achieving the global priorities expressed in the
Millennium Development Goals.
• Dr Lindiwe Majele Sibanda is CEO of the Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network.

DEVELOPMENT AS LAND GRAB.

At the same time as 'putting farming first', locally, we must pay attention to the cash rich countries, who are buying up agricultural land in Africa. Local farmers could be crushed unless there are international rules to protect them.

In Africa they are calling it the land grab, or the new colonialism. Countries hungry to secure their food supplies – including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, South Korea (the world's third biggest importer of corn) China, India, Libya and Egypt – are at the forefront of a
frantic rush to buy up farmland all around the world, but mainly cash-starved Africa.
Saudi Arabian investors have paid $100m for  Ethiopian farms where they hope to grow wheat and barley, adding to the millions of acres they already own in the war-ravaged country, as well as in neighbouring Sudan. The Saudis also have land in Indonesia and Thailand for growing rice. China owns vast tracts of overseas land, mainly in Algeria and Zimbabwe.  Kenya and Tanzania have leased land while the Ugandans have been big sellers, allocating two million acres of land to Egypt for wheat and corn.
The Saudi government and other Gulf States are negotiating with Pakistan to buy another million acres. The deal includes the services of a 100,000-man private army to protect the food being exported. Buyers or lease-holders  have also been promised legal cover in case a future government in Islamabad is less welcoming.
By far the most aggressive buyer is Saudi Arabia, where the government is now actively encouraging private investors and companies to buy farmland abroad after abandoning its attempt to be self-sufficient because of worries over water scarcity. It cut its wheat production by 12.5 per cent last year, prompting the search for new land.

 

At the African Union (AU), the agriculture commissioner, Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, is worried that many land buyers are ignoring the interests of local farmers and communities. But the AU also recognises that bringing new capital into Africa could be positive if it is
directed in the right way. Instead of purchasing land, she says, buyers or lease-holders should invest through production and trade agreements with the host country. Deals, which increased overall food production should be encouraged, a move which would bring
more food to the international markets, as well as to the poorest African households. Some of the AU's new guidelines on land sales include recommendations that new investors should promise to help with infrastructure, such as health facilities, agree to pay local taxation and look at ways to get more involved on the food-processing side which would create more local jobs. It estimated that 20 million hectares of land – twice the size of Germany's croplands – have been sold since 2006 in more than four dozen land deals, mainly in Africa. So far, most of the buyers are a mix of private investors, US private equity houses such as Sanlam Private Equity, the Saudi Kingdom Zephyr fund, the UK's CDC and sovereign wealth funds.
Subsistence farmers and nomadic tribesmen are of particular concern, since many of them do not have titles to their land and could be easily exploited by their own governments, which are desperate to sell to boost their foreign reserves. If the latest invasion of overseas money can be handled well, it could bring huge advantages to Africa after a generation of declining investment.  But much of the new money is going into capital intensive farming – and speculative bio-fuel crops – which do not bring great benefits to local farmers. One of the implications of this investment in farming is that the amount of water used to produce food and goods imported to developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world. April 2010, the 'Engineering the Future' alliance, reported that  this is unsustainable, given population growth and climate change.  "We must take account of how our water footprint is impacting on the rest of the world."  Developing countries are already using significant proportions of their water to grow food and produce goods for consumption in the West. The report says, "The burgeoning demand from developed countries is putting severe pressure on areas that are already short of water.”  The report says it means nations such as the UK have a duty to put farming first and help curb water use in the developing world, where about one billion people already do not have sufficient access to clean drinking water.  UK-funded aid projects should have water conservation as a central tenet of development. The report recommends, companies should examine their supply chains and reduce the water used in them. This could lead to difficult questions being asked, such as whether it is right for the UK to import beans and flowers from water-stressed countries such as Kenya.  
Nevertheless, the FAO predicts the number of chronically hungry will shoot up by 100 million this year – on top of the 1.4 billion people already living on the poverty line.

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

CORRUPTION  OR SOCIAL BENEFIT?

The Rio+20 Conference has been and gone. The 50,000 delegates have had a working holiday. The principles and goals were all agreed again. Agenda 21 was confirmed again. But there was little agreement about who pays. As always the ‘rich’ protest that they have no money. And the ‘poor’ assert that they want help to survive. In the Sahel region of Africa, 18.4 million people in nine countries are running out of food  today. [May 2012].

Once upon a time, I believed that 'development' and 'globalisation' were strategies designed by multinational corporations, and countries represented by  the G8, the G20, the UN, and the World Bank, to provide aid to poor countries of the world and help their people to improve their living conditions and enable more people  to survive and thrive. I was even persuaded, as a result of my English State schooling, that colonialism as practiced by the British was for the benefit of the native peoples across the world.

I no longer believe these propositions. I regard them as strategies designed to exploit the poorest countries.
The richest countries, as represented by the G8, and more recently the G20, or G77, and the multinational corporations that drive 'free market  capitalism', have exhausted many of the resources of the 'developed world', and are now looking everywhere else for new sources of
key materials. Capitalist development is the exploitation of resources and materials so as to gain maximum profits for shareholders and corporations in the home country. Globalisation and development and colonialism and slavery, are strategies of intervention by these countries and corporations for the benefit of shareholders, and the exploitation of the world's poor! and the enrichment of ‘developed countries’.

There is no doubt that the United Nations General Council are determined to utilize Development aid for the social benefit of the peoples of the ‘developing world’. They declare that the  U.N. Millennium  Development Goals, are aimed at [1] eliminating extreme poverty and hunger; [2] achieving universal primary education; [3] promote gender equality and empower women; [4] reduce child mortality; [5] improve maternal health; [6]combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB; [7] ensure environmental sustainability, [8] develop a global partnership for development.

DEVELOPMENT AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES.

It is worth noting that any government or agency that declares that a country needs ‘development’ aid is in fact asserting that the ways of the indigenous peoples are not good enough to exploit their homeland for maximum production and profit. Furthermore, it is a statement about the viability of capitalist economies, and the desirability of large industrial scale enterprises.

It is recognized by economists and government ministers and civil servants  that capitalist growth destroys resources, and communities.  In places like Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, the USA, Canada, as well as Congo, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkino Faso,  organizations of indigenous peoples are pointing out that their ways of living are designed to protect and preserve crops and trees, and maintain the sustainable development of their lands, and not to destroy the environment. It was significant that indigenous communities were present at Rio, determined to state their cases for protection.

One of the long term effects of capitalist enterprise is to devalue indigenous communities. Analyses carried out by  researchers at the Centre of International Development of Columbia University; as well as by Anup Shah of Global Issues.org; Greenpeace International, and reporters with Corporate Watch, Ethics World, Global Witness, and Aljazeera, and the Congo Week, among others, reveal that enslavement and colonialism have resulted in the dislocation of communities, the imposition of  colonial inequality, the perpetuation of long term debts, the constant introduction of virulent diseases, as well as the permanent failure of cooperative partnership.  Development projects lead to the destruction of indigenous communities.

It is not surprising  that most of the countries in Africa are poor and indebted and bankrupt. For example, the World Bank identifies Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia as among the 40 most ‘heavily indebted poor countries’ in the world [HIPC].
With very low domestic saving and low rates of market-based foreign capital inflows, there is little in Africa’s current dynamics that promotes an escape from poverty. Furthermore, given that most of the world’s population is poor, trying to survive on less than $10 a
day, there is little hope that the peoples of Africa, as well as India, and China, many of whom are on $1.25 a day, will gain an acceptable standard of living.

 DEVELOPMENT AND CORRUPTION
Ethics World informs us that often the local communities of indigenous peoples do not benefit from any capitalist projects, because the labour is imported, and all the wages and profits are directed to the home office. Greenpeace recently revealed that companies working in the poorest countries in the world take great pains to avoid paying taxes and fair wages. For example, Swiss logging company Danzer, operated tax evasion schemes such as transfer pricing, offshore accounts, use of expatriate labour, to divert profits from its forestry activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, depriving the local people of an estimated 7.8 million euros in tax revenue.  
Anup Shah,  www.globalissues.org  suggests that the scramble for Africa in the 19th century disrupted the creation of communities and countries. Artificial borders were created by Imperial Europe at the 1884 Berlin Conference simply by drawing lines on a map. These
artificial boundaries created by colonial rulers had the effect of bringing together many different communities that had little in common, and separating those who had everything in common! And thereby laying the foundations of the many conflicts that disrupt Africa today!
The Centre of International Development of Columbia University indicates that in the post-colonial age, the rich countries, including those colonial powers such as UK, France, Germany, Belgium, have often used their majority vote within the International Monetary Fund to  impose draconian adjustments on poor debtor countries. For twenty years, many of the poorest tropical countries have had insolvent governments, burdened by un-payable external debts. The international system has delayed or blocked the obvious solution: that is,  

debt cancellation. This has contributed to continuing low growth and instability in the so-called  ‘Highly Indebted Poor Countries’, the extremely poor and highly indebted countries that are subject to special scrutiny and policies of the international creditor governments.
Corporate Watch regularly reminds us that the prosperity of ex-colonies continues to be hindered by corruption and illegal practices by corporations, as well as by institutions of government. The continent of Africa is rich in resources and minerals. But its peoples remain
poor and indebted. Many other countries and corporations want access to the riches, but do not want to pay a fair price. They use their racism as the excuse for the exploitation of the lands and peoples of Africa!  A  report by Transparency International [Feb 2009]
revealed that these corporations and their agents are busy corrupting their customers for preferential terms on multiple projects. For example, in Southern Asia and parts of Africa the shortages of water to drink, and for sanitation, for the poor are not caused by the lack
of water resources, but by unfair distribution of water supplies to the wealthy as a result of bribery and corruption over water projects.
'Development' must become a social strategy for the alleviation of poverty not a capitalist strategy to line the pockets of the rich!
 
Transparency International [2010] reveals that corruption is not only fostered by corporations, but also by countries. Some of the poorest countries in the world are reported as actively promoting corruption.  The most corrupt governments were judged to be Chad, Iraq, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo. Mali These countries are involved in military action, and are in receipt of vast sums of aid funds, little of which is used to benefit the local communities and much of which is used to organize military groups.

Gandhi once proposed that there is enough wealth in the world for everybody's need, but not enough for anybody's greed.
People such as Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, among many others, have argued that there is enough wealth in the world today to totally alleviate poverty. But to do this, the wealth has to be redistributed, not spent on the luxurious lifestyles of the richest
individuals nor on the funding of military forces.

   
Development will be disrupted by climate change.

Kofi Annan's thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum, has announced that by 2030, climate change could cost $600 billion a year.
The UN study says it is impossible to be certain who will be displaced by 2030, but  tens of millions of people "will be driven from their homelands by weather disasters or gradual environmental degradation. The problem is most severe in Africa, Bangladesh, Egypt,
coastal zones and forest areas. ."
The study compares for the first time the number of people affected by climate change in rich and poor countries. Nearly 98% of the people seriously affected, 99% of all deaths from weather-related disasters and 90% of the total economic losses are now borne by
developing countries.

 CARE International reported that up to 200 million people could be on the move by 2050.
Climate Change will exacerbate stressful conditions unless vulnerable populations, especially the poorest, are assisted in building climate-resilient livelihoods."New thinking and practical approaches are needed to address the threats that climate-related migration poses to human security and well-being,"  said Warner of the UN.    For development experts, such as Ehrhart, climate change is a formidable foe that must be tackled. He doesn't want to see the hopes of the world's poorest turned to dust. It is obvious that in areas where the total population exceeds the capacity of the land to support them, the people do not thrive, and will die soon. A UN report says hunger in South Asia has reached its highest level in 40 years because of food and fuel price rises and the global economic downturn.  
The report by the UN children's fund, Unicef, says that 100 million more people
in the region are going hungry compared with two years ago. It names the worst affected areas as Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The report says South Asia's governments need to urgently increase social spending to meet the challenge.

Unicef says the region's governments need to increase spending on food, health care and education to alleviate the crisis. But it acknowledges that the economic slowdown means there is less money to spend.  But the problems of poverty and hunger are being compounded by the effects of climate change e.g. areas in Africa, Australia, and South America, that were once wet, have become dry, and their grasslands have disappeared and farming has collapsed. New deserts have formed.Rivers that once flowed to the sea are drying up, depriving many communities of sources of water. Forests become tinder dry and burst into flames, destroying vast areas, as seen recently in Victoria, Australia and California, USA and Greece in Europe. Ironically, these effects have been generated as a result of excessive pollution in the rich countries of the world such as the USA, China, and the EU.
The generation of excessive carbon dioxide, and other gases such as methane, chloroflourocarbons, and soots, cause heat retention in the atmosphere, and rising temperatures.
Oct 2011: the Berkeley Earth Project, California, published a report that confirmed that global average temperatures are rising. The project denied the viability of the 'climate change deniers'. We have to conclude that the 1 billion starving today will soon become 2 billion, and all will soon die. Doomsday – tomorrow! Their deaths will be the result of the spread of industrial farming, and the impacts of climate change. They will die not as the result of their own actions but the changes generated by other people living on the other side of the world. Our free market capitalist society enables the rich to prosper and to live for more than 70 years. The poor majority struggle to survive, and 80% die before the age of 70. If the population balance is altered by starvation, disease, and calamity, and conflict, the projected increase to 9 billion in 2050, will become a decline! Doomsday - today! Tomorrow!

GESELLSCHAFT?
GEMEINSCHAFT?
           
Theories of Social Relations.

The debates about

social or selfish?

dependent or independent?

Gemeinschaft or gesellschaft?

Individual or group?

Individual freedom or social freedom?

continue to inform our theories of society.

There are many who want to emphasise their independence, often as an excuse to defend their selfish acts. The concept of Social freedom describes the ways in which we are all interdependent, and exercise our freedoms in relationships with others. Wecannot survive alone. Indeed it is impossible to be alone in any meaningful way.

It seems difficult  for individuals  in isolation [gemeinschaft ] or  in a state of  anarchy, to accept that  we carry the words, the ideas, images and relationships of others within our heads. Many individuals want to deny that we exist within a social matrix of relationships with others.  We may be lonely, but not alone. The conditions of society that are being described and criticized in this discourse are the by products of the mindsets and cultural filters that inform the behaviors of capitalist activities, and minimise the reality of our interdependence [gesellschaft ]  They are built upon the delusion of independence which assumes that individuals can be free to pursue their own freedom [anarchy]  and greed and aggrandizement, regardless of others, and  their impacts on others [after Tonnies]. Such assumptions have to be challenged. And are being challenged on several fronts.
Bourdieu (1998) argued for the need to analyse the work of  the 'new intellectuals', the doxosophers, whom he blamed for creating a climate favourable to the withdrawal of the state and to the dominance of the values of the economy.
‘I'm thinking of what has been called the 'return of individualism', a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy which tends to destroy the philosophical foundations of the welfare state and in particular the notion of collective responsibility.
Diane Swanbrow returns us to the issue of the selfish and the altruistic, exploring a new theory that selfish genes make humans selfless. She reports that humans are altruistic by nature, according to a new theory published in the issue of Psychological Inquiry [2006].  The theory focuses on explaining the kind of altruistic behavior that involves costly long-term investment in others, such as parenting, caring for the sick or injured, and protecting family and
comrades in times of conflict or war. This behavior typically entails considerable sacrifice of time, effort, health, and even life itself. Considering the self-centered motives  that continue to drive human behavior today, it's worth considering why people make these kinds of sacrifices, says U-M psychologist Stephanie L. Brown, who developed the new theory in collaboration with her father, Michael Brown, a psychology professor at Pacific Lutheran University.
Brown and Brown argue that the social bond - the glue of close interpersonal relationships- gesellschaft -  evolved to discount the risks of engaging in high-cost altruism. They propose that social bonds override self-interest and motivate costly investment in others. The formation of social bonds must have occurred mainly between individuals who were dependent upon one another for reproductive success, or whose evolutionary fates were linked. This linkage would have provided givers with a genetic safety net, making them resistant to exploitation, says Brown, [http://www.med.umich.edu/medschool] a faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research [http://www.isr.umich.edu] affiliated with the ISR Evolution and Human Adaptation Program.
Effectively, this selective investment theory presents a striking alternative to traditional self-interest theories of close relationships that tend to emphasize what individuals get from others, not what they give.

Viewed through the lens of selective investment theory, Brown says, the fabric of close relationships appears different. Sacrifice becomes a characteristic feature of healthy, enduring relationships rather than aberrant, inexplicable, or diagnostic of pathology.
What makes selective investment theory distinctive is its focus on high-cost altruism, but also its premise that selfish genes ultimately are responsible for selfless, other-directed behavior. Selfish genes can produce selfless humans, says Brown, explaining that high-cost altruism helped insure the survival, growth and reproduction of increasingly interdependent members of  groups.

Viewed in this way, the spread of altruism in humans is no surprise, she says.  In support of their theory, Brown and Brown cite evidence from a wide range of fields, including neuroendocrinology, ethology  and behavioral ecology, and relationship science. The same hormones that underlie social bonds and affiliation, such as oxytocin, also stimulate giving behavior under conditions of interdependence.
The Browns say their theory has important implications for relationship science. We do not deny that close relationships involve selfish motivation, says Stephanie Brown, but the picture may be more complex. If social bonds evolved to support altruism then we may need to re-think the way we view human sociality. Models of psychological hedonism and rational self-interest may need to be expanded in order to describe our behaviors in families, at work
and even on the national stage. [http://www.umich.edu/~regents] Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA 1-734-764-1817.
Can we reconcile the models of hedonism and self-interest [gemeinschaft] with those of social bonds and interdependence [gesellschaft] ? All the evidence of our personal lives as children, and as adults; as pupils, friends, brothers, sisters, parents, teachers, family, workers, employers, and so on, indicate that we exist within various social networks, providing mutual support. However, despite these facts of dependence and interdependence, many individuals disregard this evidence, and construct personal visions in which they are free to do as they please, and exploit others for their own aggrandisement. It is worth reminding ourselves that we live in capitalist societies where the few control the actions of the many. 1230 individuals control global resources and enterprises by controlling many trillions of dollars. While up to 7 billion live in relative poverty unable to develop cooperative, social enterprises.

The concept of Social Freedom is offered as an alternative to hedonism, self-interest, and individualism. Social Freedom involves an epistemology of social interaction, dependence and interdependence. It is not communist  in the modern sense, according to which each person is subject to the dictates of the leaders of the commune, or the political party. Nor is it communitarian whereby individuals  do as the community demands. Nor is it to be regarded as any type of nationalism, which claimed to develop social freedom as exclusive, fascist and racist, fostering the freedoms of the national society.

Our Social Freedom recognizes the actions of individuals by drawing attention to the social networks in which they are enacted. It means that we become free by learning and interacting with others. We cannot be free as one, only as many. This means that we have to develop a philosophy and a morality that sees others as significant, not just figments of our imaginations or as lesser people. We act and interact together. What we do, we learn from others; and we tke notice of our impact upon others. Once we accept our social interdependence, we can work together to secure the freedom of all. The notion of individual freedom is a delusion. An individual human cannot exist, nor survive, nor thrive, alone. Whether we recognize it or not, our social interdependence is a social fact. Our social lives are a continuum in which the actions of all affect all. So there is a moral responsibility for the one, and the many, to realize their  interdependence. Ignoring our interdependence has drastic consequences particularly on the environment. The notion of individual independence has strong impacts upon us all. For example, Conservationists assert that if we continue to seek our individual gratification by consuming all the products and all the resources of the world, then there will be no sustainable future for our children.
The nature of our interdependence is such that the greed of some brings about the hunger of others. In order to secure the happiness of all we must act in consideration of all others. Humans are responsible for all the damage and destruction perpetrated by  inequality and exploitation. They are responsible for conservation and renewal; and have to accept that this world is the only home...not a temporary stop on the way to heaven. All people are responsible for each other, and need to care and share; not disregard and destroy others because they have different beliefs; or look  different; or speak different languages. It is necessary to adopt a different mind set, and  use other cultural filters

Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in prison, and his walk to
freedom in February 1990, and the final collapse of Boer
apartheid in South Africa, emphasized the truth of the ancient
Bantu adage: numuntu ngumuntu ngabantu; (we are people through other people).And he saw the inevitability of mutual interdependence in the human condition: that  the common ground is greater and more enduring than the differences that divide.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/articles/mandela/index.html  
If we consider humans as problem solving, tool using animals that live in communities, then the dilemmas set by environmental issues, poverty, capitalism, globalisation, and others are another set of problems that may only be solved by social action based on our interdependence, and recognition of the need to gain social freedom through this social interaction. Kofi Annan, in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize states that:
‘We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire.  
If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see
further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make
no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has
entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness
of the bonds that bind us all in pain as in prosperity has gripped young
and old.’  Researches into environmental changes have indicated that some actions have global impacts. The use of certain chemicals; the widespread use of coal and lignite; the combustion of oil products; the discharge of sewage into the sea, and  lakes; have catastrophic effects upon the atmosphere and the lithosphere of the earth. Environmental studies, and the development of ecology, have revealed that the actions of humans in one part of the world impact directly upon those in other parts. We can no longer pretend that what we do locally has no impact globally. Ecology has indicated that we are all embroiled in environmental networks, and that we have to think of all humans as part of our global societies, and as active elements in the environment.
Social Ecology leads us to see that we are a global community, able to act and think locally and globally. . The fallacy of individualism leads me to give value only to myself!

Once I see that I am socially interdependent with everyone, and that I gain any freedoms in unison with others, then I can see the moral imperative to care and share for others. I must look after my 'sisters and brothers'. Once I give everybody else 'value' and recognise that they are 'worthy', then I must look after them. I do not need any belief in a 'god' to give me the authority to care for others: only to believe in the value and worth of all others and to gain our social freedom.

For references, go to http://www.kelvynrichards.com/     Discourse: A Social Ecology