By Alonso David Ojeda
The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the governing body of the international conventions signed by member states of the United Nations, which examines the implementation of conventions on climate change. COP16, dedicated to biodiversity, was held from October 21 to November 1 this year in Cali, Colombia.
These meetings reflect and express the domination of large transnational corporations, exercised through governments that unequivocally serve their interests. They have become an assembly for capitalism to promote and attempt to justify its decrepit system at a time when phenomena such as climate change worsen.
The focus of this COP16 was genetic biodiversity and its appropriation by the pharmaceutical and agro-industrial corporations for the purpose of maximum profits. This is happening despite the accelerated and unprecedented deterioration of biological diversity, which has placed 25 percent of plant and animal species in danger of extinction.
Capitalism is more aggressive, all-encompassing and destructive than ever before. Its objective is to defeat working people’s historic struggle to resolve societal contradictions between capital and labour, and between society and nature. It is not surprising that COP16 had a notable absence of reports on biodiversity by country, on failures to follow up on the commitments of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and on the goal of securing $200 billion to protect biodiversity.
Big capital and the most polluting industries accumulate large profits based on environmental deterioration, while the whole of humanity suffers the consequences. It shows the truth of Marx’s statement that “capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings.”
Marx warned more than 160 years ago that capitalist agriculture was unviable, making one of the first critics of agribusiness and its destructive impact on nature and biodiversity.
As it struggles against the contradictions in capitalist society – which can only be resolved through revolutionary change – the working class has the task of replacing the dominant capitalist technologies, which are increasingly decadent and incompatible with the planet’s biophysical limits, and stopping the patterns of consumption which they impose.
Tribuna Popular (Venezuela)
Translated from Spanish by PV staff
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