The maneuver, which pretends to keep alive the clean development mechanism although the mitigation commitments of developed countries expire, was described immoral during the plenary session of the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol.

The mechanism is one of the resources of flexibility created by the Kyoto Protocol to facilitate developed countries comply their duties on climate matter.

In face of the perspective by many industrialized nations not to prorogate the Kyoto mitigation commitments, they pretend to continue enjoying the benefits emerged as part of the pact, approved in that Japanese city in 1997.

The stance of the nations opposed to the maneuver is the clean development mechanism expires on December 31, 2011, whether a second period of commitments of the Kyoto Protocol is not safe.

The mechanism is not that the way for developed countries to invest in mitigation actions in developing nations, to increase their domestic emission levels.

The Kyoto Protocol´s article 12 states that the objective of the clean development mechanism is to help countries that do not join the Annex 1 of that document to achieve a sustainable development.

During the session of the Conference of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol held on Tuesday, the African Group stated that the carbon market will collapse whether there is no an agreement regarding to the second period of commitments of the pact.

The 7th Conference of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol and the 17th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change began on November 28 and will conclude December 9.

(Prensa Latina)

Spain, also a NATO ally, is just a “Guest Country”.

We are talking about a meeting among the great producers of industrial machinery and articles and of the great suppliers of raw materials that, over half a millennium following the Conquest, were European colonies and in the past century supplied them with agricultural products, minerals and energy resources, victims of a pitiless unequal exchange.

This dark period in history has been going on since the descendants of the Barbarian tribes populating Europe “discovered” and conquered this hemisphere, armed with swords, cross-bows and harquebuses.

“The discoverers”, so covered with excuses by the so-called western world, as if a part of humanity hadn’t been living on the continent for 40 million years, harboured the aim of seeking a shorter trade route to China.

In that country, with which they had antecedents via the silk merchants and merchants of other products prized by the aristocracy and burgeoning European bourgeoisie, they had found a fabulous civilization having a written language, refined arts, agriculture, metals, gunpowder and advanced principles of political and military organization, including armies with tens or perhaps thousands of cavalry.

They were on the point of capsizing when they sighted land, in the vicinity of Cuba. A short while later Columbus took possession of our island in the name of the King of Spain. Would he have been able to do that had he actually landed in China, as he had proposed? His error cost this hemisphere tens of millions of lives that were lost as consequence of the partitioning of the Americas by the Papal Bull between the two kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, and in the constant conflicts among the medieval nobility.

The Conquest and the search for gold and silver, as the genial native painter Oswaldo Guayasamín pointed out, cost 70 million lives of those living in the hemisphere, birthplace of important civilizations.

Black Africa can also speak about what that Conquest meant for millions of its children, ripped away and sold as slaves in this hemisphere.

The multi-million-dollar oligarchy, whose Heads of State or Government will be meeting in Cannes with the representatives of almost 6 billion inhabitants that aspire to a decent existence for their peoples, should meditate on these realities.

Those countries would like to monopolize technologies and markets through patents, banks, the most modern and costly transportation means, cybernetic supremacy over complex production processes, control of communications and the mass media in order to dupe the world.

Now that the inhabitants of the world number 7 billion, the states representing only one out of seven persons, who, judging by the massive protests in Europe and the United States, are not very happy, put the survival of our species at risk.

Could anyone forget that the US was the country that impeded the Kyoto Agreement when we had a little more time to prevent a catastrophe with the climate change that is being produced as we watch?

On the 28th and 29th of October past, another meeting of Heads of State and Governments took place: the community of Ibero-American countries. Among the calamities that the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking peoples have had to put up with is the fact that they are the region in the world with the most inequalities in terms of the distribution of their wealth.

Cuba’s Chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla travelled from the UN meeting in New York on the blockade of Cuba to the capital of Paraguay where that second meeting was being held. There, highly interesting things were being said about the crisis that is sweeping over the European Community.

The new prime minister of Portugal poured out his bitterness with the European Union when he declared that it has become exhausted and without funds with the record rescue of Greece.  It could face up to a crisis in Portugal but it would be bankrupt, unable to aid Italy, the seventh world economy, and this would drag down France whose banks hold the greatest part of the Italian debt.

The Iberian leaders doubt that the commitment assumed with Greece would be fulfilled and if it is not fulfilled they predict a longer crisis than that of 1929.

This morning, the news dispatches inform about the drastic consequences of the never-before-seen rainfall in Thailand, the major rice exporter whose sales will be reduced from 25 million tons to 19.

In contrast, news about China increasing its production of metal copper to almost 5 million tons caused considerable effect.

However, while the US keeps intact its veto power at the International Monetary Fund, China is being denied the simple right of approving the Yuan as convertible currency in that body.  How long will that tyranny prevail?

It is through this looking-glass that we must analyse every single word that is spoken at the G-20 Summit.

Fidel Castro Ruz

November 2, 2011

8:54 p.m.