Campaign blog

After our audacious application to demolish St Paul’s yesterday, the last ditch attempt to save the sacred Niyamgiri mountain and the way of life for the tribal people who live there began in earnest.Kumuti Majhi, tribal elder of the Dongria Kondh tribe told the Vedanta AGM in London how their people will suffer if mining goes ahead.

"From the beginning we have opposed mining. Niyamgiri is a God for us. It is also the source of our food, our water, our survival. Last year I was here and requested Vedanta shareholders not to mine our area.

"This year I am here to request all the shareholders to save our livelihoods and save our god."

Niyamgiri dominated the meeting with questions from all quarters. The company and its investors were left in no doubt about the disastrous consequences of their actions. We’ve also written to the 70 largest investors of Vedanta – urging them to intervene to protect the human rights and environment of the people of Niyamgiri.

• Sign the petition.
• Read the coverage in the Independent.

Photo: Kumuti Majhi, 55, of the Khondh tribe outside the Vedanta AGM© Aubrey Wade/ActionAid

You might be slightly surprised to hear we’ve just submitted application to demolish St Paul’s Cathedral – supported by the natty depiction you see here.

Bit extreme you might think? Don’t fancy us decimating a sacred monument? Well it’s exactly what’s happening to the Kondh tribe in eastern India at the moment. The Niyramgiri is their sacred mountain– but British mining company Vedanta Resources plans to open a huge strip mine on their ancestral land.

Official studies suggest that mining will lead to massive deforestation, destruction of protected local ecosystems and disruption of key water sources. Yet Vedanta has ignored the Kondh’s protests, and is proceeding with its plans.

Today we’ll be at the Vendanta AGM alongside two members of the tribe, protesting against what's happening. As ActionAid campaigner Brendan O’Donnell says "Vedanta’s investors should be appalled that their money is backing the desecration of a sacred Indian site and the destruction of forests on which people rely for food, clean water and a living."

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photo: © Nick Purser/ActionAid

As the summit comes to an end and I prepare for some sake-fueled celebrations (that should probably be commiserations given what I'm about to say) you're probably wondering if the G8 leaders did anything to impress me and the rest of my colleagues at ActionAid. Sadly not.

Here's ActionAid's official take on the summit. The full press release can be read here.

How did they do? An analysis of the G8’s outcomes

Africa: uninspiring

• Existing policies and aid pledges have been heavily recycled this year.
• Last year's G8 pledge of US$60bn for health now has a timescale (five years), but there is still no indication of who will pay up and exactly when.
• Agriculture proposals focus on commercial farming and largely ignore the potential of smallholder production and the role of women as Africa's main small-scale food producers.

Food and hunger: unrepentant

• Food aid and other emergency measures so far announced only address the extremes of hunger, not the food insecurity facing hundreds of millions of people.
• Astonishingly, no recognition of the role of biofuels in the food price crisis. No action against the EU and US targets and subsidies that have encouraged their use.
• Lip-service to smallholders; but investment in agriculture, for the G8, still means investment in high-tech, industrial agriculture.
• Misplaced faith in trade liberalisation. Ill-conceived liberalisation is part of the problem: it brings in cheap food but in many countries it has destroyed local agriculture.

Climate change: untargeted

• Support for 50% global emission cuts by 2050, but no indication of what the G8's share of this might be, and no commitment to action until India and China agree to curb their emissions. Confusion over the extremely contentious issue of the baseline year for emission cuts, with the Japanese suggesting 2008 and the Europeans saying 1990.
• No mid-term targets, though the G8 admits they are needed. The Bali target of 25-40% reductions by 2020, supported by NGOs and the "+5" group (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa), is not mentioned.
• G8 supports 'second generation' biofuels despite evidence (from ActionAid and others) that even these non-food crops are taking land out of food production and causing hunger.
• Misplaced enthusiasm for the Climate Investment Funds as a way of promoting adaptation and clean technology. The most vulnerable countries are under-represented in the funds' management. The funds will provide much of their money as loans, not grants. And all this counts towards the G8's aid targets, instead of being additional.

Let's design a nuclear power station the G8 way. The design will be produced by an international committee of eight people chosen for their political influence and good contacts. Technical knowledge optional.

The first rule is: no negative thoughts. Everyone here has their own agenda, and the only way we will reach agreement is if we are basically optimistic about everything, and confident that any little problems will solve themselves.

Rule 2 is that everything will be rigorously science-based. That means we ignore NGOs and people like that, and take our advice from large corporations who employ lots of PhDs.

Rule 3 is that we work bottom-up, not top-down. Instead of having a goal or a plan, everyone in the team will do what they feel able to. If there are some bits which don't get done, maybe they weren't that important anyway. Of course, we want to avoid a disaster. But we don't want anyone trying to do more than they find comfortable.

Fortunately the G8 don't personally design nuclear power stations. But this really is how they are tackling climate change. The summit statement on environment and climate change is a collection of hopeful ideas - things like burying the carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power stations. There are hardly any numbers in the document, though numbers are as crucial to this subject as they are to engineering or banking. There seems to be a phobia of targets, or of governments actually taking the lead.

It's childish. Financially sound Gordon Brown, and scientifically trained Angela Merkel must know that.

"Hello Kiddies!" is how the online campaign group Avaaz greeted the G8 leaders in a full page ad in Tuesday's Financial Times, based on the cutesy Hello Kitty characters that are the rage in Japan. Avaaz asked the three most climate-childish leaders (Japan's Fukuda, Canada's Harper, and the USA's Bush) to do just one thing: adopt a 2020 emissions target instead of leaving it to 2050 before we next check the thermometer. Did they? Do kids ever listen?