Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
By Sophie Soloway ‘23
Global Editor
Two recent environmental developments in Africa have highlighted the role that farmers may play in sustainability for the continent. Levels of pollutant gases have lowered in areas, and a recent lawsuit in favor of local farm owners appears to signal a renewed sense of urgency around the issue of climate change.
In Nigeria, farmers have spent over a decade facing the impacts of oil spills which occurred in 2006 and 2007 and devastated local water sources and arable land. Recently, a collective of local farmers accused Shell Petroleum Development Company, a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch Shell oil company that operates in Nigeria, of negligence in both spills. After initially being found not guilty in 2013, a Dutch appeals court ruled on Jan. 29 that the subsidiary was responsible for both the initial spills and the failure to undo the resulting damage. While this ruling can be appealed to the Dutch Supreme Court, the appeals court instructed Shell to build better warning systems in Oruma and Goi, the villages impacted by these specific spills.
This case followed research on the environmental impacts of socio-economic progress in another African region. On Feb. 16, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences released a study proving that NO2 emissions over north equatorial Africa have decreased substantially. This change is occurring despite increased fossil fuel use and has been traced to a decrease in biomass burning by farmers during the dry season, which is from November to February.
According to this study, there is a well-established parallel between the growth of countries and their rising pollution levels. According to The Borgen Project, development often relies on the mass exploitation of natural resources and increased use of fossil fuels, both of which increase pollution levels.
Assistant Professor of Sociology Ayca Zayim noted that this relationship is tied to the structural agreements that often precede such development efforts. In her view, globalized economic systems do not incentivize sustainability. “We live in a world where anything that is shipped is not accounted for, so CO2 emissions do not go under any country’s record,” Zayim explained.
Zayim added that this system widely benefits those profiting from such pollution, saying, “Those organizations that designed this global trade system prioritized international trade over climate and the environment. It was a deliberate decision.”
Assistant Professor of Economics Theodore Gilliland noted that these transformations are also impacted by changes in consumption patterns. “As you industrialize, there’s going to be a reallocation of how goods are produced and what people are consuming,” Gilliland said.
While these recent developments are indeed promising, they are not necessarily long-lasting or replicable. “Things can be case specific. It’s hard to draw an overall conclusion that as you industrialize pollution will follow a particular pattern. In some cases it’s true, and in some cases it isn’t,” Gilliland explained.
Environmental studies major Corrine Celupica Liu ’23 made a similar observation regarding the recent lawsuit, noting that the win for local farmers in the Shell case may not be as impactful as they hoped.
“While it’s obviously good that these locals will get compensation, courts will never rule [or] force polluters to compensate local communities enough that it would even out to the profit that could be made if sustainable practices were in place, or if such companies actually collaborated and empowered local communities to create jobs and infrastructure,” Liu explained.
However, rather than repairing the harm already done to the Niger Delta region, the lawsuit may have real value in future response actions. “I hope that the court ruling that these local farmers are entitled to monetary compensation will create a new warning that corporations cannot take advantage of less developed [or less] stable nations in order to profit,” Liu said.
Instead, Gilliland highlighted that understanding farmers’ motivations in halting biomass burning might be more helpful in predicting these patterns. “Once you know the mechanism of how industrialization links to the pollutant, you’d be able to say whether or not this is going to happen in a similar or different place,” Gilliland said.
Because pollution is the leading cause of death on the African continent, both the lawsuit and the scientific findings will likely benefit local citizens, according to The New York Times. Still, they do not disrupt larger trends of increased emissions and resource extraction. These systems of environmental disruption are not unrelated to the history of imperialism that has shaped African countries. As Gilliland noted, “There’s a risk if you have an imperialist approach where one of the main interests for Western nations establishing colonies was to extract resources, and that’s what they did. The goal wasn’t to help those countries develop or make sure that value stayed in the country. That establishes certain pathways and institutions that are good at extracting resources without helping anyone.”