Rich nations under pressure over climate finance at COP29 talks

Pressure mounted on wealthy nations Wednesday to put a figure on the table as time runs out at COP29 to strike a deal on climate assistance for poorer countries.


Issued on: 20/11/2024 
By:  FRANCE 24
Developing nations say rich historic polluters have a duty to help them face the challenges caused by the climate crisis. © Laurent Thomet, AFP


At the UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, rich nations have still not revealed how much they are ready to provide the developing world to fight climate change. UN agencies have said that developing nations, not counting China, will need $1 trillion a year by the end of the decade to meet the challenges caused by the climate crisis.

"We need a figure," said Adonia Ayebare, chair of the G77+China group of developing nations.

"Then the rest will follow. But we need a headline," the Ugandan negotiator told reporters.

Developing nations, from islands imperilled by rising seas to drought-afflicted states, contribute the least to global warming but have called for $1.3 trillion annually to prepare for its impacts.


They say rich historic polluters have a duty to help, and are clamouring for an existing commitment of $100 billion a year to be increased many times over at COP29.
 
Read more  How lending-based climate finance is pushing poor countries deeper into debt

Talks have gone around in circles for over a week but a slimmed-down draft is expected to land in the early hours of Thursday, ensuring a sleepless night for negotiators.

"I'm sure we will have some long days and hours ahead of us ... This will be a very steep climb," EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told reporters.

Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said it was difficult to speed things up "when there's nothing to negotiate".

"The concern is that at this moment, nobody is putting a figure on the table," Muhamad said.

Rich countries on the hook for climate finance, including the European Union and United States, say they cannot show their hand until they know what they are agreeing to.

"Otherwise ... you will have a shopping basket with a price, but you don't know exactly what is in there," said Hoekstra.

"We don't just want to pluck a number from the sky," echoed Germany's climate envoy Jennifer Morgan.
China role

Developing countries, excluding China, will need $1 trillion a year in foreign assistance by 2030 to wean off fossil fuels and adapt to worsening disasters.

This number rises to $1.3 trillion annually by 2035, according to an expert economic assessment commissioned by the United Nations.

But many of the nations obligated to pay face political and fiscal pressures, and insist they cannot cover this cost on their balance sheets alone.

Developing countries want public grants from governments – not loans or private capital – to make up the majority of the new finance goal under negotiation.

Three figures – $440 billion, $600 billion and $900 billion – had been floated, said Australian climate minister Chris Bowen, one of the envoys leading the finance negotiations.

Delegates from several countries told AFP these numbers were not proposed by developed nations themselves.

"Many parties told us they need to see certain building blocks in place before they can put forward their suggested number," Bowen told COP29 delegates.

Chief among these is a demand for emerging economies such as China and Saudi Arabia, which have grown wealthy yet remain classified as developing nations, to chip into the pot.

"There are countries out in the world that have an income level that is close to or above the poorest European countries, and we think that it's only fair to ask them to contribute," Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard told AFP.
'Receding hope'

Bowen said some countries had drawn a "red line" over the type of money that could be included in any deal, insisting it come "from a wide range of sources and instruments".

Bolivia's chief negotiator, Diego Pacheco, said there was a "steadily receding hope of getting an ambitious" deal and cited $200 billion as one number in circulation.

"Only 200 billion," he told the conference. "This is unfathomable, we cannot accept this."

The lead negotiator of COP29 hosts Azerbaijan, Yalchin Rafiyev, urged countries to "pick up the pace".

"Let us embrace the spirit of collaboration, compromise and determination to ensure that we leave this conference with outcomes that make a real difference," he said.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)

Thank You for Emitting: The Hypocrisies of COP29

by Binoy Kampmark / November 19th, 2024

COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers.  It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021.  Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%.  A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are made up of oil and gas, with much of its wealth failing to trickle down to the rest of the populace.

The broadly described West, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev in his opening address to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was in no position to be lecturing his country about cutting back on the use of fossil fuels.  They were, he grandly claimed, “a gift from God”.  In this, he should have surprised no one.  In April 2024, he declared that, as a leader of a country “which is rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and to continue production.”

A few days later, Aliyev played the other side of the climate change divide, suggesting at a meeting with island leaders that France and the Netherlands had been responsible for “brutally” suppressing the “voices” of communities in such overseas territories as Mayotte and Curaçao concerned with climate change.  (Aliyev himself is no stranger to suppressing, with dedicated brutality, voices of dissent within his own country.)  This proved too much for France’s Ecological Transition Minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who cancelled her planned attendance to the summit while attacking Baku for “instrumentalising the fight against climate change for its undignified personal agenda.”

On the second day of the summit, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, tried to turn the attention of delegates to the urgent matter at hand.  “The sound you hear is the ticking clock – we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and time is not on our side.”  Others, however, heard the sound of money changing hands, with the fossil fuel industry lurking, fangs and pens at the ready, presided over by the good offices of a petrostate.

In the background lie assessments of gloomy inevitability.  The Climate Change Tracker’s November 2024 briefing notes this year was one characterised by “minimal progress, with almost no new national climate change targets (NDCs) or net zero pledges even though government have agreed to (urgently) strengthen their 2030 targets and to align them with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement.”

As easy as it is to rage against the opportunistic Aliyev, who crudely blends environmentalism with ethnic cleansing, few attending the summit in Baku come with clean hands.  As with previous COP events, Baku offers another enormous event of emitters and emission, featuring tens of thousands of officials, advisors and minders bloviating in conference.  That said, the 67,000 registrants at this conference is somewhat lower compared with the 83,000 who descended on Dubai at COP28.

The plane tracking website FlightRadar24 noted that 65 private jets landed in the Azerbaijani capital prior to the summit, prompting Alethea Warrington, the head of energy, aviation and heat at Possible, a climate action charity, to tut with heavy disapproval: “Travelling by private jet is a horrendous waste of the world’s scarce remaining carbon budget, with each journey producing more emissions in a few hours than the average person around the world emits in an entire year.”

COP29 is also another opportunity to strike deals that have little to do with reducing emissions and everything to do with advancing the interests of lobby groups and companies in the energy market, much of it of a fossil fuel nature.  In the spirit of Dubai, COP29 is set to follow in the footsteps of the wily Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who chaired COP28 in Dubai.  Prior to the arrival of the chatterati of climate change last year, the Sultan was shown in leaked briefing documents to the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) to be an avid enthusiast for advancing the business of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc).  It was hard to avoid the glaring fact that Al Jaber is also the CEO of Adnoc.

The documents in question involve over 150 pages of briefings prepared by the COP28 team for meetings with Jaber and various interested parties held between July and October this year.  They point to plans to raise matters of commercial interest with as many as 30 countries.  The CCR confirms “that on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber; a source with knowledge of discussions also told CCR that Adnoc’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country.”

The COP29 chairman, Samir Nuriyev, had already put out feelers as early as March this year that a “fair approach” was needed when approaching countries abundant with oil and natural gas, notably in light of their purported environmental policies.  He went so far as to argue that Azerbaijan was an ideal interlocutor between the Global South and Global North.  His colleague and chief executive of the COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, showed exactly how that process would work in a secret recording ahead of the conference in which he discusses “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a person posing as a potential investor.  (The person in question purported to be representing a fictitious Hong Kong investment firm with a sharp line in energy.)  “We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” Soltanov insists.  “We will have a certain amount of oil and gas being produced, perhaps forever.”

In many ways, the Baku gathering has all the hallmarks of a criminal syndicate meeting, held under more open conditions.  Fair play, then, to the Azerbaijani hosts for working out the climate change racket, taking the lead from Dubai last year.  Aliyev and company noted months in advance that this was less a case of being a theatre of the absurd than a forum for business.  And so, it is proving to be.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

The Planet Under Threat of Breakdown

by Robert Hunziker / November 19th, 2024

There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.

A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as climate change has turned into an ogre of destruction that’s impossible to ignore, featured on nightly news programs with automobiles tumbling as if children’s toys in torrential rivers of city streets (Paiporta).

Meanwhile, COP29, the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change, Nov 11^th-22^nd, is being held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. Such a strange coincidence: UN climate meetings have become an outgrowth of oil producer largess. After all, they do have spectacular venues, hmm. Gotta wonder what they’ll do to stave off all-time record heat, caused by fossil fuel emissions, Co2? The paradox is devastatingly inescapable.

A key data point exposes the challenge COP29 faces: Annual CO2 released into the atmosphere, 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023 vs. 9 billion metric tons in 1960.

According to Dr. Patrick McGuire, of the University of Reading and National Centre for Atmospheric Science: “The new Global Carbon Budget reveals a disturbing reality – global fossil CO2 emissions continue to climb, reaching 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024. Despite clear evidence of accelerating climate impacts, we’re still moving in the wrong direction. The need for rapid decarbonization has never been more urgent.” (Source: “Fossil Fuel Co2 Emissions Increase Again in 2024,” University of Reading, November 13, 2024)

Also, of more than passing interest at COP29, according to Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF: “Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in the US election will drip poison into the climate talks.” (Source: Bloomberg Green Daily: COP29 Climate Money Fight)

The planet is losing key support. Yet, it doesn’t take a climate scientist to figure out the planet has already gone ballistic with (1) rampant wildfires (2) torrential rains (3) massive destructive floods (4) brutal scorching droughts (5) pounding hailstorms (6) frightening thunder/lighting all unprecedented and all on a regular schedule nowadays. There are no more once-in-100-year storms; they’re every other year.

Recent talks on protecting nature at the UN Biodiversity Conference d/d October 21-November 1st in Colombia collapsed when nations could not agree on key goals. This was the 16^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It was a disaster: “Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark ‘Paris Agreement for nature’ deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.” (Source: Carbon Brief Nov. 2, 2024) By summit’s end, only 44 out of 196 parties had come up with a new biodiversity plan. This is pitiful.

As for Net Zero prospects to halt global warming, forget it!

At the G20 summit September 9-10 countries demanded rolling back promises to cut back burning oil, coal, and gas (Source: “G20 Countries Turning Backs on Fossil Fuel Pledge, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2024).

“Over the last few months, we’ve seen everyone from major corporations to countries backpedaling on climate commitments made in the recent months and years. Despite growing, urgent evidence that climate change continues to accelerate, this is no real surprise.” (Source: Countries Are Rolling Back Their Climate Commitments, Climatebase, October 7, 2024)

Global corporations from Ford to J.P. Morgan Chase are all rolling back their commitments to climate change, which is all deeply intertwined with what played out ahead of COP29, now playing before bemused Middle Eastern oligarchs.

“Instead of indicating that the money required to green the economy is ready to flow, industry leaders now say their first priority is delivering financial returns for clients—and that means energy-transition investments will only be undertaken if they’re considered profitable,” (Source: “Wall Street Wants You to Know Profit Comes Before Net Zero,” Bloomberg, September 18, 2024.)

The bankers are pointing their fingers at the politicians and governments, who have been largely unwilling to make significant headway in fighting climate change globally.

Meanwhile, stating the obvious, which cannot be emphasized enough, climate warning signs have never been stronger than this year. Just for starters, a 2–3-foot sea level rise hangs by a cryosphere thread at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. If it goes down for the count, and there’s reason to think it’ll happen during current generations, all bets are off for 8 of the world’s 10 largest megacities, nestled along coastlines. This is but one of several tipping points at the edge, and tipping. The protagonist is fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which makes up around 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the primary greenhouse gas responsible for the majority of climate change impacts.

And it is a fool’s errand that carbon capture/sequester will save the day; it’s too slow too unwieldy too expensive too inefficient takes too long and overwhelmed by the task at hand, sans super-duper-effective technology. “Despite its long history, carbon capture is a problematic technology. A new IEEFA study reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.” (Source: “Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022)

Losing key support for the planet couldn’t come at a worse time. According to Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”

Alas, losing key support because of “concern over profits” is nonsensical and trivial at best, thinking small, not big. A report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research contradicts that notion and exposes the silliness behind focus on “profit over planet,” to wit: “The analysis of data from 1,500 regions over the past 30 years showed that 30 percent have managed to lower their carbon emissions while continuing to thrive economically.” (Source: Green Growth: 30 percent of regions worldwide achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions, Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research, Oct. 29, 2024)

Beyond the insanity of profits at the expense of mitigation efforts for the planet, which exposes the underbelly of high-end capitalism, some good news: According to some climate experts, Trump’s re-election and his statements that green energy is a scam, and the likelihood that he withdraws the US from UN Climate agreements might drive a new sense of unity, even building a coalition that actually does something positive to stop fossil fuel emissions to support a parched planet. It’s possible, but here in America Wall Street prefers profits over planet. Umm, honestly, shouldn’t that be reversed?

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Dam and Deluge: Decoding Tripura-Bangladesh Floods

Ananyo Chakraborty | 05 Sep 2024

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Empirical data suggests it was the heavy rainfall caused by monsoon winds and low pressure, not the opening of sluice gates of the Dumbur Dam that prompted the disaster.

In the third week of August 2024, disturbing visuals of people — poor and helpless — relocating to relief camps from their houses submerged under water were seen on social media. With no regard for national boundaries, an unprecedented deluge had affected North Unkoti, Dhalai, Khowai, Gumti and South Tripura districts of Tripura in India, and Kumilla, Chattogram, Noakhali, Feni, Khagrachhari, Maulvibazar, Habiganj, Brahmanberia, Sylhet and Lakshmipur districts of Bangladesh.

A war of words ensued between the Indian and the Bangladeshi sides, with Bangladesh’s Nahid Islam, one of the anti-discrimination students’ movement leaders who is part of the recently-installed Interim Government, commenting that it is India who is responsible for the disaster wrecked upon more than 36 lakh people. The Dumbur Dam, situated in Tripura over the Gumti River that flows into Bangladesh, had released large amounts of water on August 21, after 31 years. Many flood-affected people accused that it was ‘India’s water’ that drowned them. India, by intentionally opening the sluice gates of the Dumbur dam in the middle of the night without informing the Bangladeshi authorities, was accused of unleashing water as a ‘weapon’ against their country.

The Indian authorities regarded these allegations to be factually incorrect. On August 22, the Ministry of External Affairs in a statement claimed that “the catchment areas of Gumti river that flows through India and Bangladesh have witnessed heaviest rains of this year over the last few days. The flood in Bangladesh is primarily due to waters from these large catchments downstream of the dam.”

This line of reasoning has been echoed in a report by the Bangladeshi news portal Prothom Alo. It quoted Sardar Uday Rayhan, an official of the flood security division of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, who said that the seven main rivers of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Bangladesh were already flowing above the danger level. The lunar cycle had caused high tide waters to rise above normal.

Additionally, the low pressure created on the sea had entered the land on August 18, and caused a severe landfall in Tripura and the hilly parts of South-Eastern Bangladesh. Reports suggest that on 19th August, Feni, Khagrachhari, Noakhali, Kumilla, Maulvibazar in Bangladesh and South Tripura in India had received unexpectedly high rainfall, which worsened the flood situation. However, some experts argued that India should have forewarned its neighbour about the dangerous flood situation prevailing upstream.

Empirical data suggests that it was the heavy rainfall caused by monsoon winds and the low pressure and not the opening of sluice gates of the Dumbur Dam which had prompted the disaster. The waters of the Dumbur lake flow into the Gumti River and pass on to Bangladesh. After flowing through large parts of Kumilla, Debidwar, Muradnagar, and Daudkandi, the waters move into the Meghna River system. The rivers Feni and Muhuri, which flooded large parts of South-Eastern Bangladesh, have no connections with the Gumti River and the Feni district is not situated in the Gumti River valley either. Heavy incessant rainfall in Feni and the discharge from the hills caused floods in Khagrachhari and Feni. In Chouddogram in Kumilla, the Dakatia River had overflowed. Due to the saturation of the canals and waterways in Noakhali, the flood waters did not get passages to be drained out. The pressures from the Brahmaputra River system only added to the problem.

Long-term climate trends also support India’s argument. Bangladesh is one of the world’s regions most vulnerable to natural hazards caused by anthropogenic climate change. The World Bank’s 2024 ‘Climate Risk Country Profile’ of Bangladesh stated that about 56% of the country’s population lives in areas most exposed to floods and other natural hazards. The World Bank’s ‘Country Climate and Development Report’ on Bangladesh published in October 2022 regarded climate change-induced flooding as “the most economically draining natural hazard” in the country.

According to the statistics presented by the World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, the average annual occurrence of floods was 81 between 1980-2020, which amounted to 26.56% of the total number of natural hazards afflicting the country. Ahsan Uddin Ahmed’s 2006 report titled ‘Bangladesh Climate Change Impacts and Vulnerability: A Synthesis’, in its discussion of the country’s vulnerability to floods listed the following reasons for the occurrence of floods: “huge inflow of water from upstream catchment areas coinciding with heavy monsoon rainfall in the country, a low floodplain gradient, congested drainage channels, the major rivers converging inside Bangladesh, tides and storm surges in coastal areas, and polders that increase the intensity of floodwater outside protected areas.” The report further stated that floods of high intensity occur when the rate of discharge of the river is less than the rate of accumulation of water. These are often caused by inefficient water management infrastructures.

Despite objective facts hinting at a more complicated scenario, tendentious keyboard warriors from both India and Bangladesh got busy bashing each other on social media using reductionist (or untrue) statements. Bangladeshi YouTubers waged a concerted campaign to attack the Indian government. They complained that India has built dams on all 54 rivers draining into Bangladesh and is robbing their country of their fair share of water. Indians retaliated with crude humour about the plight of their neighbours struggling to sustain their lives. Vain invocations of God’s wrath were made in reference to the violence inflicted upon Hindu places of worship by supporters of Jamaat-i-Islami after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster from power in July.

India using water as a ‘weapon’ against Bangladesh is an allegation far from the truth. Only two of the dams built on rivers flowing into Bangladesh from India are large-scale irrigation barrages: the Farakka Barrage on Ganga/Padma and the Gajoldoba Barrage on Teesta. Since these barrages divert a lot of water into water channels towards India, they have been subjects of long-standing disputes between the two countries which will be discussed later in the essay. All the other dams are either hydel dams or check dams. None of these other dams divert river water or affect its flow significantly.

The Nagor, Tangon, Punorbhobha and Atrai rivers flow from Bangladesh’s Dinajpur district into West Bengal’s South Dinajpur and again into Bangladesh’s Rajshahi division. There are check dams present on Tangon, Punarbhaba and Atrai in Bangladesh’s Dinajpur. The rivers of North Bengal: Jaldhaka, Torsha, and Raidak are glacial rivers and their waters are not diverted. There is no diversion of the Brahmaputra River or the Barak River and its tributary Jatinga in Assam. From Mizoram, the Karnaphuli/Khawthlangtuipui River flows into Bangladesh, which only has a hydel dam at the Kaptai Lake in Bangladesh.

In Tripura, none of the North-flowing rivers — Manu, Dhalai, and Khowai — have any dams on them. The Muhuri River has a small check dam named Kalashi. The Gumti River harbours the much-discussed Dumbur Hydroelectric power plant, but there is no diversion here as well. 80% of the rainwater from the Meghalaya hills flows southwards into Sylhet and Mymensingh, forming and replenishing large natural lakes or Haors.

We understand that the current floods have been caused by a complex admixture of long-term and short-term processes shaping the region's riparian landscape. However, the anti-India sentiments harboured by a significant section of Bangladeshis regarding water-sharing cannot be dismissed as completely ludicrous. Their genesis must be traced back to political, economic, and ideological constructions of the past.

The idea that river waters should be ‘owned’ and ‘controlled’ for human needs goes back to the colonial period. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, through a discussion of the works of the noted engineer Sir William Willcocks (who was also responsible for the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt), showed how the fluvial Bengal Delta was dependent upon ‘overflow irrigation’ by the rivers in the ancient and medieval times. The regime of private property, inaugurated in Bengal by the Permanent Settlement, made land a prized commodity (for maximising revenue demand) meant to be safeguarded from the erratic action of rivers. Later, embankments and irrigation facilities were built to control the river waters.

Similarly, Rohan D’Souza, in his study of the Odisha riparian delta, demonstrated that interests of colonial capital had transformed the delta from ‘flood-dependent’ to ‘flood vulnerable.’. An ecological regime based on the forceful control of flood waters and subsequent transformation of fluvial ecologies into land markets (through the reclamation of marshes and alluvial char lands, as has been argued by Debjani Bhattacharyya) was laid out by the British colonial state.

With the Partition in 1947, there was a major change in the ecological regime of the Bengal Delta. Most of the alluvial fertile lands of East Bengal went to (East) Pakistan, while the rivers which drained them flowed through India. In his study of (West) Pakistan, Daniel Haines has argued that river waters had become crucial elements of nation-building in the aftermath of the Partition. Most of the lands in undivided Punjab were dependent on irrigation from the rivers for cultivation. Since the Radcliffe Line had sliced rivers into halves between the two countries, issues of control over the waters got translated into issues of sovereignty. Rivers became ‘national’. Both countries tried working out arrangements to ensure an equitable sharing of river waters. The 1960 Indus River Water Treaty, though with its share of problems, was a success.

The situation in the Bengal Delta was more complicated. Joya Chatterji showed that Murshidabad, despite being a Muslim-majority district, was brought into India due to the Congress’ insistence to keep control over the Ganga waters. The Ganga moved southwards into its lower course from this district, and if the river went into Pakistan, the Congress feared that Pakistan might arm-twist India into submitting to an inequitable water-sharing arrangement. There were several border disputes over control of river waters and the islands formed on them in the 1950s and 1960s. India and (East) Pakistan shared 54 rivers, as mentioned earlier, and in almost all cases, the latter was the lower riparian. (East) Pakistani authorities were anxious that India would deprive them of their waters. Things came to a head when India commissioned the building of the irrigation barrage at Farakka in Murshidabad over the Ganga/Padma River.

The 2,240-meter-long Farakka barrage, by diverting 40,000 cusec waters from the Ganga River into the Bhagirathi, was intended to serve two main purposes for India — increasing the navigability of the moribund Hooghly River, which was endangered due to the Damodar Valley Corporation project, and create convenient rail and roadway connection between south and north West Bengal. The (East) Pakistani (and later the Bangladeshi) authorities vehemently opposed the project. They feared that the dry season flow of the Ganga would be significantly hampered.

Surprisingly, this concern had been echoed by Kapil Bhattacharya, a Superintendent Engineer of the West Bengal Irrigation Department, who, in his book titled Bangladesher Nod Nodi Porikolpona first published in 1954 and reprinted in 1959, had presented a serious critique of the Farakka barrage plan. He saw it as prompted by capitalist interests. Apart from severely affecting the agrarian ecosystem surrounding the Ganga/Padma in (East) Pakistan, the barrage, he argued, would cause devastating floods in Bihar and Malda, and the rapid siltation of the Hooghly River. He also warned that the fierce rivers of North Bengal (the likes of Kushi, Mahananda and Teesta) might bring down significant amounts of water and flood large parts of the region. Going forward with Sir Willcocks’ earlier suggestion of building a dam below the source of the Mathabhanga River in Nadia was the rational solution for Bhattacharya. Despite having noble intentions, his opposition to the project was not viewed kindly by the Indian authorities, and he was termed a Pakistani spy by a section of the Indian journalists.

After the barrage became operational in April 1975, a historic long march from Rajshahi to Chanpaibabganj in demand of decommissioning the project was led by the nonagenarian mass leader Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. He accused India of depriving Bangladesh of Padma waters. At the diplomatic level, the Bangladeshi government accused India of violating principles of mutual cooperation in water-sharing. Although India and Bangladesh signed the Ganga Water-sharing agreement in 1996 (which stated that both the countries would receive 35,000 cusec flow in alternate 10-day cycles between March and May), the woes of Bangladesh were far from being mitigated, mainly due to climate variability. Kapil Bhattacharya’s ominous predictions have been vindicated, and apart from Bangladeshi politicians, Indian leaders like Nitish Kumar have also called for the removal of the barrage.

The dispute regarding the Teesta River is more complicated, since Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, has opposed the arrangement of reserving 42.5% of its waters for India and 37.5% for Bangladesh. According to Banerjee, this would lead to the drying up of approximately one lakh hectares of land in North Bengal, thereby seriously affecting agriculture. The claim is only partially true.

Apart from Teesta, the northern part of West Bengal is primarily drained by glacial rivers like Torsha and Jaldhaka which do not have any diversions. Also, the irrigation potential of Teesta has been seriously compromised due to the rapid accumulation of alluvial soil due to the Gajoldoba barrage, climate variability, and the alleged illegal extraction of sand from the river beds. There has been no significant effort on part of the West Bengal government to solve the problem, which in turn is already affecting thousands of farmers in the region. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities have proposed to invest $1 billion to dredge the Teesta River and build embankments to form a single manageable channel. India is opposed to this, owing to fears of Chinese intrusion near the strategically important ‘Chicken neck’.

The controversy regarding the proposed Tipaimukh dam on the Barak River rests on anxieties regarding the future of the endangered Haors in Bangladesh. In recent years, Bangladeshi public opinion towards India has veritably turned sour after Bangladesh allowed the latter to draw 1.82 cusecs of water per second from the Feni River in 2019 to help the inhabitants of Sabroom in Tripura.

The colonial legacy of extending sovereign control over river waters, the fateful Partition of 1947, and the ill effects of anthropogenic climate change plague people of both countries today. When I am writing this piece in the comfort of my privileged dwelling, lakhs of people in Tripura and South-Eastern Bangladesh are fighting against their present predicament to secure an uncertain future. Rivers flow along the line of least resistance. They care little about national boundaries. Or about who is a Hindu or a Muslim. Vigorous attempts to demarcate ‘national’ rivers with little regard towards preserving the fluvial ecologies of the Bengal Delta will invariably cause ‘international’ hazards like what we are witnessing today. What now? I am no expert to suggest any remedy. I am a fool trying to stop a forest fire with a bucketful of water. I earnestly hope that I am not the only one. 

 I would like to extend my heartiest gratitude to my dear friend Srestha Majumder for her constant encouragement and valuable inputs during the process of writing this piece. Nahid Rahman sent me important resources which came in handy: many thanks to him too. In the age of rampant misinformation, illuminating Facebook posts by Alakes Guchhait have been godsent. Lastly, the brilliantly committed on-ground reportage of the flood situation by Ganashakti has been a source of great inspiration to me.

The writer is a post-graduate from the Department of History, University of Delhi. The views are personal. This article was first published in the Lokayata blog on August 30, 2024.

The United States and the Middle East: Blatant U.S. Hypocrisy

by Robert Fantina

 August 23, 2024
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It is said that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The United States government seems intent on disproving that last condition.

For months, U.S. spokespersons have been saying how they are working tirelessly to arrange a ceasefire to end Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Some candidates and elected officials decry the slaughter of innocent men, women and children in Gaza. Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said she will not be silent about the suffering of innocents in Gaza. And yet, these are members of the same government that is supplying the very weapons causing that suffering.

Lame-duck president Joe Biden, often referred to as ‘Genocide Joe’, has sent hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel since the beginning of this genocide. The recent slaughter of over 100 Palestinian men, women and children, sheltering in a school and praying in a mosque, was done with U.S.-made bombs. These bombs shred their victims, forcing survivors to try to find the remains of their loved ones from the scraps of skin and bones remaining.

If these illustrious officials truly wanted peace in the Middle East, and sincerely believed that genocide is wrong in all cases, this slaughter would have ended months ago. All it would have taken is notification to Israel’s Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu that the money tap from the U.S. was being turned off immediately. Without that source of funds, the Zionist entity is helpless. It is incapable of defending itself without significant assistance from the U.S. and other countries, as demonstrated when Iran, with prior notification to Israel, bombed it in April of this year. Israeli intelligence is flawed, as demonstrated by the extent of the resistance event on October 7, and how the government of the Zionist regime was caught completely off-guard.  The government doesn’t have the support of its people, as shown by the massive demonstrations prior to October 7, opposing Netanyahu’s proposed changes to the judiciary, and by those afterwards, demanding a ceasefire so the hostages could be released.  It cannot live in peace with its neighbors; despite the ‘normalization’ with some Arab countries, the people in those countries continue to oppose any association with the racist Zionist entity.

And now we are being told, by straight-faced U.S. imperialist leaders and their spokespeople, that the ceasefire agreement is in jeopardy due to Hamas’ unwillingness to agree to it. We can all see how this will be marketed: the ‘terrorist’ Hamas militants do not want peace and are willing to allow the continued slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, and to see them starved to death, simply due to their hatred of Jews.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In June, Genocide Joe proposed an agreement that he said Israel agreed to. Hamas then agreed to it, with the terms of how it would be implemented still to be determined. Not so fast, said Netanyahu. He apparently didn’t think Hamas would agree, so once they did, he had to change the terms. He is now demanding control of the Gaza-Egypt border, major restrictions on movement of Palestinians in Gaza, and continued military presence of Israel within Gaza’s borders. These, of course, are totally unreasonable, and are conditions no nation would agree to.

The Prime Murderer isn’t interested in such trivialities as human rights and international law, the same as his main sponsor in genocide, the United States.

Let us look at a few facts:

The Leahy law “… refers to two statutory provisions prohibiting the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights (GVHR).” According to Human Rights Watch:

“The Israeli Government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.

“Israeli officials have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel – statements reflected in Israeli forces’ military operations.”

In October, Aljazeera reported the following: According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, in times of armed conflict, there is an overall requirement for the “…protection of people who do not take part in any hostilities – be it children, patients or healthy adult men. A number of its articles directly address the importance of medical support.” Israel has bombed every hospital in the Gaza Strip.

Bombing hospitals, depriving people of medical care, food and water are only some of the shocking violations of the human rights of the Palestinians that Israel is committing. Yet the U.S. government is not only continuing to fund Israel with hundreds of millions of dollars of deadly weaponry, it is increasing the amount being sent. So the U.S. is violating its own laws.

The occupation of Palestine is illegal under international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has said that “… Israel has no right to sovereignty of the territories, is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and is impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination.” The ICJ further stated “… other nations were obliged not to ‘render aid or assistance in maintaining’ Israel’s presence in the territory.” The United States is in violation of this international law.

Vice-President Kamala Harris stated the following in July: ““What has happened in Gazaover the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.” This either demonstrates her ignorance, or her desire to control the narrative, because she said nothing about people who have been displaced for the tenth, twentieth or thirtieth time. Countless thousands take shelter where they can for a day or so, before being forced to flee to another location.

Is there ever a time when U.S. hypocrisy isn’t front and center on the world stage? After Israel assassinated the chief Hamas/Palestinian negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31, in Iran, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made sure to issue a warning to Iran. In reference to a possible ceasefire, National Review reported the following on August 19: “’It’s also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process,’ he added, seemingly referring to Iran. ‘And so we’re working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way move us away from getting this deal over the line, or for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity.’”

Was not the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh a provocation? Why was Blinken ‘seemingly referring to Iran’, when he should have been demanding that Israel make no further provocation?

Let us summarize. The United States is working tirelessly to end a genocide that it supports in every way possible. It wants Palestine to give up its decades-long struggle for self-determination, so that Israel can further oppress the Palestinian people. It will wage war to assure that none of Palestine’s allies are able to assist the people suffering there.

There are, of course, some people, mostly only within U.S. borders, who belief the myth of the U.S. as a beacon of freedom, human rights and international law. Their numbers are dwindling, but the U.S.’s imperial leaders aren’t paying attention. U.S. hypocrisy, always a hallmark of U.S. foreign and domestic policy (a topic for another essay), can hardly be denied by anyone today. The evidence is there, on social media, some ‘mainstream’ news channels, and in the accounts of eye-witnesses to the unspeakable slaughter occurring in Gaza, and the increased oppression in the West Bank.

U.S. efforts to thwart the work of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice must be opposed and defeated by the global community. If the U.S. is allowed to succeed, one can only wonder where the next U.S.-protected genocide will occur. The list of possible victims is, unfortunately, quite long.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Propaganda, Lies and False Flags: How the U.S. Justifies its Wars.