On a “fact sheet” presented to investors on their website, Baladna outlines its mission to “ensure healthy, natural food resources to contribute to the self-sufficiency of the State of Qatar” (“Fact Sheet”). But some important facts are elided or obscured by this presentation. The discourse of self-sufficiency, that this statement can be seen as playing into, glosses over the environmental impacts of its production. Transporting the livestock and creating the conditions for their survival has not been an easy task, and certainly has contributed substantially to Qatar’s carbon footprint. Shortly after the blockade, an Australian ship brought in thousands of sheep, and around 4,000 cows were brought in by plane (AlArabiya). According to the OECD, about 17% of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by agriculture. One can assume that the emissions produced by cooling systems (Washington Post), massive desalination plants (Rahman and Zaidi), and other infrastructural projects that support Baladna’s operations are not trivial. And ultimately, most of these projects are only possible because of the country’s reliance on fossil fuels; Qatar was the world’s leading exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) in 2019 (Sönnichsen).
In “Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil,” Hannes Bergthaller argues that modern understandings of freedom, indeed our understandings of modernity itself, are built on fossil fuels. He argues that in order for us to transition away from petromodernity (the kind of modernity enabled by fossil fuels), as we must to survive, we should interrogate and rearticulate our notions of what freedom means. The self-sufficiency discourse surrounding Baladna ignores the fact that Qatar is put at risk by its activities that contribute to climate change. The way such a discourse understands freedom is what is of interest to me in this post. By presenting self-sufficiency as “freedom”–rather than a more comprehensive freedom articulated alongside an awareness of environmental consequences–this discourse is paradoxical. It perpetuates a notion of “freedom” that eventually undoes itself, as environmental catastrophes destroy the “freedoms” it enables. As such, it is emblematic of petromodernity; it’s an understanding of freedom that, according to Bergthaller, needs to be deconstructed and reformulated in order to transition away from our suicidal dependence on fossil fuels.
However, this case study also raises a number of questions about Bergthaller’s argument. For one, the deconstruction that he argues will help us change our idea of freedom, and thus move away from fossil fuels, is itself largely enabled by fossil fuels. Given the material conditions that enable these practices (deconstruction), there is an ideological tension between the argument that it is important and should continue and the argument that we must extricate ourselves and our ideas from fossil fuels. As a student at Georgetown Qatar, my education is financed in large part by fossil fuels. Arguably, I would not be writing this without Qatar’s LNG production. If deconstruction as an academic practice is so dependent on the socio-economic base of fossil fuels (at least to continue at the same scale), how can it lead us meaningfully past them? While I agree with Bergthaller that deconstruction can help change how we view freedom, I don’t think this gives enough importance to the material conditions that constrain and give rise to our practices (and thus our ideas). Moving past fossil fuels might also require admitting that, after a certain point of usefulness, deconstruction and academia as currently understood might also be unsustainable.
Works Cited
AlArabiya, “Cow Farm in Qatari Desert Struggles Amid Boycott,” https://english.alarabiya.net
/en/business/economy/2017/06/18/Cow-farm-in-Qatari-desert-struggles-amid-Arab-boycott. Accessed November 2, 2020.
Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil.” The
Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 1st edition, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, Michelle Niemann, Routledge, 2017, pp. 424-432.
“Fact Sheet.” Baladna, https://baladna.com/investor_relations/fact-sheet/. Accessed November 2,
2020.
Mufson, Steven. “How Qatar’s Cows Show the Growing Resistance to a Saudi Led Boycott,”
The Washington Post Online, July 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ middle _east/how-qatars-cows-show-the-growing-resistance-to-a-saudi-led-boycott /2019/07/19/78880256-a4b2-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html. Accessed November 6, 2020.
OECD. (2016) “Agriculture and Climate Change: Towards Sustainable, Productive and
Climate-Friendly Agricultural Systems.” https://www.oecd.org/agriculture/ministerial/
background /notes/4_background_note.pdf. Accessed November 2, 2020.
Sönnichsen, N. (2019) “Liquefied natural gas: major exporting countries.” July 1, 2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274528/major-exporting-countries-of-lng/. Accessed November 4, 2020.
Zaidi, Javaid & Siddiqui, Hammadur. (2018). “Desalination in Qatar: Present Status and Future
Prospects. Civil Engineering Research Journal, 6. 10.19080/CERJ.2018.06.555700.
