More frequent and intense heatwaves, driven by climate change, are harming the health and wealth of sellers at the daily street market in the shadow of Delhi’s iconic Red Fort, a study has found.
Researchers from Greenpeace India and Workers’ Collective for Climate Justice South Asia interviewed ten market sellers from the huge Lal Qila (Red Fort) Market, as well as activists, social workers working with this community.
They found that men and women selling products like shoes, clothes and dried fruits to the local community are standing for hours in the sun and suffering headaches, dizziness and fainting spells.
“By 11am, the sun feels like it’s piercing through the skin,” said one unnamed trader. “By evening, our feet are swollen, and we can’t even feel our toes properly,” said another.
On International Workers Day in Delhi on Thursday, groups representing hundreds of thousands of workers launched the “Workers’ Collective for Climate Justice – South Asia” and signed a petition calling for governments to tax fossil fuel companies to fund climate action.
India heats up
In each of the last three years, India has been hit by summer heatwaves which scientists say have been made much more likely and much hotter by human-induced climate change.
Although far from the typical June peak, this year temperatures are already in the high 30s C (around 100F), harming the capital city’s several hundred thousand market sellers and other informal workers like rickshaw drivers, waste pickers and domestic workers.
Workers are trying to adapt to the changing climate but shade-providing tarpaulins are torn down by authorities and a lack of accessible drinking and toilet facilities means keeping hydrated is a challenge.
Sandeep Verma is an advisory board member for Youth Organisation for Democratic Development and Help in Action, an organisation that campaigns on behalf of market vendors in Delhi. He told Climate Home that using public toilets in Lal Qila costs at least 10 rupees ($0.11) each time.
Because of these “very high charges”, he said, vendors avoid drinking. While men find it easier to urinate publicly, it’s a “very difficult situation” for women, he added. The Greenpeace report finds urinary tract infections and kidney stones are common consequences.
Despite the health impacts, many market traders reported lacking the time, documentation or confidence to access public health systems.
“With clinics often hostile or overcrowded, workers self-medicate, ignore symptoms, or work through illness until their bodies break down. Climate crisis, in this context, is not just ecological, it is deeply biological, marked by silent inflammation, exhaustion, and untreated ailments”, the report found.
Heatwaves have financial costs too. A separate 2023 study in Delhi found that for every degree Celsius increase in the temperature, informal workers lose around a fifth of their net earnings.
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Verma told Climate Home that Delhi’s residents avoid markets in the extreme heat, reducing customer footfall and vendor earnings. The heat also spoils food and flower products, as vendors lack refrigeration.
Tarpaulins torn down
Traders are trying to adapt to heatwaves by wearing cooler cotton clothes, wearing headscarves, hats and wet clothes, and consuming glucose sugar sachets.
They also use tarpaulin sheets, umbrellas and plastic covers for shade or set up their stalls under trees or near buildings. But municipal authorities often remove this shade, the report says, as these makeshift structures are considered ‘encroachments’.
“They don’t allow us to put up cloth covers, even when everything’s melting,” said one street trader surveyed by researchers.
Verma said that municipal authorities and police officers will seize all a trader’s goods, putting them temporarily out of business, and that the procedure to get goods back takes 15-20 days.
He added that, since the 2014 Street Vendor Act, such seizures are unlawful unless notice has been served. His union is filing legal cases against these seizures but this has proved time-consuming and so far unsuccessful, he said.
The report’s authors say that vendors should be able to use umbrellas, tarpaulins and mobile carts without fear of confiscation and that community cooling centres and designated vending zones with heat-resilient roofs, ventilation, drinking water and sanitation should be set up.
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It found that street vendors are getting together to share information and lobby the authorities. They are represented by the National Hawker Federation and Janpahal, who offer legal aid and campaign for them while the Self-Employed Women’s Association supports female vendors.
“These support groups are critical not just during episodes of state-led eviction drives or crackdowns but also during periods of distress” like the Covid-19 lockdown or heatwaves, the report found.
Many market traders have been able to secure identity cards and vending certifications under the 2014 street vendors law, giving them more rights. Verma is calling for the provisions of this law to be enforced in full.
The post Climate-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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