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I though Alexandre's evidence on man-made famine in India was very apposite. But that seems to be a quite different proposition than the one made at Kyoto and Bonn.
It was by its systematic underdevelopment of Indian agriculture that Britain created the conditions of famine. Specifically, the Colonisation of India simply substituted one archaic system of exploitation for another, as the colonial authorities expropriated the agricultural surplus in the form of tax, just as the Indian elites had. That meant that there was no tendency to apply the surplus product to increase productivity.
In the 1970s, with famine re-emerging, Indian scientists introduced high-grain yields ('the Green revolution').
The Kyoto agreement, by contrast, would limit India's industrial productivity, by limiting its CO2 emissions, and thereby limit its agricultural productivity (as agriculture was starved of tools, fertilisers and machinery). Such a process would of course be exacerbated if financial pressure was applied to buy India's emission rights under the Bonn scheme.
The man-made famine is the one that comes as a consequence of limiting productivity, not increasing it. -- James Heartfield
-But if those informations on global warming are right, the consequences of increasing the CO2 emissions could be catasthropic. What I mean is that, while Third world countries must not be limited on their industrial development (as the USA wants to do, Bush argued that the Kyoto agreement was unfair to the USA, because it put more severe strains on the USA emissions than to the Third World countries), the waste of fossile combustibles must be controlled. The developed countries, are the worst responsible for this waste, and the individual transportation is probably responsible by a large volume of emissions. On the other hand the poor countries would be the main losers of a global warming, since they don´t the resources to deal with the disasters. This dilemma is a serious one and I think it can´t be solved if the world continues to be governed by the market. On famine, I would like also to add that the main cause of malnutition in the world is lack of food security troubles and unfair distribution of both food and wealthy, since the overall world agricul- tural output is sufficient to prevent famine.
Alexandre