The change can be seen when examining Qatar’s development process throughout recent years. Especially comparing it to before the blockade, when Qatar relied on imports from outside the country for a wide range of products and services. Although after the challenge that left Qatar with difficulties in importing necessities for its citizens, they recovered quickly through the expansion of local production companies. Qatar was self-reliant and independent and had an immediate sense of reaction to how to overcome this issue while ensuring the needs of the citizens. This means that Qatar is now self-reliant through agricultural produces as a contributing factor to the country’s growth. Although this raises many concerns in terms of looking into various factors that affect the social and environmental factors in Qatar, this is through the negative changes in climate causing many risks for different reasons. The secondary articles would look at sharing similar concepts with Qatar’s current situation and could be adapted to help improve it. Qatar can be viewed as a country with a vast development speed. However, it also suffers from high levels of pollution. It prioritizes or pays more attention to expanding and improving capitalism than environmental issues. I argue that Qatar should look into different, more eco-friendly strategies when it comes to labor production. In general, that will limit the harm caused to the environment as they need to balance prioritizing the needs of people and how they overuse the benefit that nature provides us through different ways. Through my research plan, I looked into Qatar’s food strategy plan to budding a robust system and an interview with an employee at a large local produce company which allowed me to engage with scholarly articles I will apply to my case study.
The Capitalocene
The first article, “The Capitalocene” by Benjamin Kunkel, focuses on giving a deeper insight into the Capitalocene system that we live in and the connection between humans and nature. He also focuses on the law of cheap nature by Jason. The article highlights how Widespread fossil fuel consumption, being the leading cause of ‘climate change,’ is still profoundly changing the weather by escalating extreme levels of heat while leading to more droughts; progressively, it will end up ruining agricultural output. In relation to Qatar, we can see how it’s the country, and local production companies, based on primary research, are facing struggles with the weather as the summer season is the longest and takes up the majority of the year, making it only harder to deal with the intense waves of heat that are caused by climate change and keep increasing every year. Another concern that this article raises is that Agriculture may perform better than in biodiverse ground conditions. However, there are reasons to be concerned natural soil land area is drying up, and accesses to groundwater is limited which is essential to agriculture, can be completely hard to deal with the current level of harm caused by humans towards the environment. Not only does this cause a climate crisis leading to habitat loss and extinction and other concerns, but this also leads to difficulties to be faced regarding food security and having enough produce for the entire world. With Qatar’s strategic plan to create a robust food security system, they are leading more towards cheap natural labor to provide produce for society without having to rely on a large number of imports compared to the years before the blockade. The text supports my argument as it emphasizes how “Governments and corporations, for their part, have little incentive to slow, much less stop the general destruction. The collective activity of humanity is sapping the ecological basis of civilization – and no collective agency capable of reckoning with the fact can yet be discerned”. In relation to Qatar, we can see how the government and local companies are aware of the effect of climate change and how much damage is caused through labor procedures; although we should switch to “Green arithmetic” thinking as Moore suggest, this simply means that we balance between the society needs and how we act towards nature and what it provides for us.
After oil
Moving the “After oil: Article tackles a similar concept that my case study focused on, which is the process of ensuring Food security and safety in Qatar to produce High-quality products despite the negative approaches used in order to ensure these qualities that allow the buyers to be satisfied with the products. Based on primary research through my Interview with Mr. Ziv, I discovered that as a company, they would like to implement alternatives to technologies that can be more beneficial for both the company and the surrounding environment as a whole. Although due to financial limitations and no government support in this situation, it’s hard to have access to these technologies that are more reliable and sufficient, as this is one of many obstacles that make it harder to look at other energy transmissions. As the article mentions that “This is the epistemological and practical problem of the impasse of fossil fuels—that is, what blocks us from transitioning to other forms of energy—and of the economy locked into its rhythms.”. Although the way Impasse is approached in this article provides us with a positive view of looking into other strategies that are not primarily energy based or that require the use of oil. This article also mentions a variety of reasons that should “Trigger” energy transitions through the global warming trigger that is caused by human action, although acting into the impasse may require us to give up some practices and allow us to fully adapt to the changes despite not knowing the outcome. This can be a risk because it raises many concerns about how certain things will function without the use of oil. One of the intentional transitions that stood out was “sustainability,” as it’s a required factor when transitioning to other energy sources and as a framework that should be applied to stay away from any harm to the environment. Linking it to the food security plan in Qatar, they want to ensure sustainability in terms of wood waste, food transportation, and food quality, and some of them require the usage of energy that creates damage to the environment, meaning that they are apart of energy impasse which holds them back from taking the risk and looking into different alternatives for energy that could be eco friendly while still being productive. As some of these practices require large amounts of fuel, whether it’s storing fertilizers and seeds or improving trade routes, they all have a high reliance on energy fuels, as finding alternatives may not be enough to meet those needs efficiently. At last, the sooner we have the courage to look into other henry forms that are more eco-friendly, the faster we will be able to save our planet and ourselves.
In conclusion, there are many strategies and alternatives that Qatar and local produce companies should look at. In addition, to be courageous to try different forms of energy as the government should focus less on prioritizing expanding capitalism and the economy and pay more attention to the climate crisis that has only been getting worse over time. This could be through funding these companies with technologies that replace the need for fossil fuels, it’s time to take this issue into full consideration, and there is no time to waste since it would also make it easier for these local produce companies to maximize their production thought having to worry about damage towards the environment or high levels of heat.
