MM -- July/August 1992

I would like to reply to the article by Daniel Newman, "The Taxol Giveaway," in the May issue of Multinational Monitor . The article charges that the National Cancer Institute has given away a valuable government property, the anticancer drug taxol, to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), which stands to make "billions" of dollars at the expense of cancer patients. I strongly disagree with both the alleged facts and the conclusions presented in this article.

In 1991 the National Cancer Institute (NCI) selected BMS as its exclusive partner for a commercial license to develop taxol, after a full and open competition. Only four companies applied for this license, including three American firms. Of these, BMS was the only company with significant previous experience in cancer drug development. The lone foreign applicant, Rhone-Poulenc, owns rights to a closely related competitive product, taxotere, and, if awarded the taxol partnership, could have enjoyed a formidable advantage over any other company interested in this field. While this fact alone would not have affected this company’s standing to compete for the license, it is relevant to the discussion. The reasons for the lack of interest on the part of other major American or foreign drug companies stemmed from the obviously significant development costs and difficulty in manufacturing the drug, which is derived from tree bark; its apparently modest antitumor activity, which at that time was confined to ovarian cancer; and the fact that the Government had not filed for a patent. BMS, in separate action, has applied for and received excluive marketing rights to taxol, but only for ovarian cancer treatment, under the Orphan Drug Act. If NCI had decided to offer a non-exclusive working partnership, I seriously doubt that any company would have been willing to apply for this license, given the high costs of evelopment and risk. Witness the meager response to the advertisement for an exclusive partner.

The article raises the issue of a "potential" conflict of interest on the part of Dr. Robert Wittes, an NCI employee who left the government to join Bristol-Myers as a senior vice president for cancer research in 1988. Dr. Wittes left the NCI in 1988, before a decision was made to seek a corporate partner for taxol development and one year before we advertised for a taxol development partner. In 1989 BM merged with Squibb. In the corporate reorganization that followed, Dr. Wittes found fewer opportunities for clinical research, and we successfully recruited him to return to the NCI as chief of our intramural Medicine Branch. His return was hailed by the press and the academic community as evidence of a rejuvenation of clinical research at NCI. Dr. Wittes was actively recruited by a number of other cancer centers. He had no role in NCI’s selection of BMS as the CRADA partner in February 1991.

BMS has proven to be a thoroughly responsible partner in taxol development. It has greatly up-scaled the production of the drug for research purposes, and has invested an estimated $100 million in the initial phase of this effort. Because of improvements in drug supply, it has been possible for NCI to make taxol available nationwide to ovarian cancer patients who have relapsed after standard treatment, and this has been done at no cost to the patient. During the past year, BMS has given no evidence of being the "greedy" company described by the article. It recently introduced ddI for AIDS treatment at a price that is 20 percent of the price charged for AZT at the time of AZT’s introduction five years ago. It has also established broad programs to provide drugs at no cost to indigent patients. We have every reason to believe that this responsible attitude will be reflected in the future pricing of taxol, when and if it is approved for marketing.

Other forces, not acknowledged in the article, will control the price of taxol. As mentioned previously, taxotere, a closely related drug, has progressed into clinical trials and is showing a pattern of clinical activity very similar to that of taxol. NCI is co-developing this drug with Rhone-Poulenc , a fact ignored by the article. In addition, NCI intends to carefully examine BMS’s pricing policy for taxol to assure that all patients will have access to this drug at reasonable cost. We have the right to revoke our agreement with BMS if this is not the case. During the past year, NCI-supported researchers have made considerable progress in synthesizing taxol and have identified alternative sources of taxol. It is very likely that these sources will reduce the production costs and increase the availability of the drug in the near future.

Contrary to the article’s implication, existing agreements signed by BMS, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the interior do not "give away" bark from trees on Federal lands for commercial purposes; this bark is being provided to BMS for manufacture of the drug for research purposes only. Personally, I can think of no better use of tree bark than to produce a life-saving drug, and I am sure both patients and doctors agree with this position.

At the heart of this controversy is the question of whether and how to commercialize inventions made in Federal laboratories. It has been the wise position of Congress that federal scientists have an obligation to seek commercial partners for their inventions in order to bring the fruits of their labors to the public. This has been done for taxol in a free and open competition. If this process proceeds in a responsible manner, as it has done thus far, the interests of the public will be well served.

Bruce A. Chabner, M.D.

Director, Division of Cancer Treatment

Washington, D.C.

To the editor:

I am a Guyanese and have just returned from a month’s visit to that country and wish to add my voice to the growing number of persons both here and in Guyana who are concerned about the dangers of unfettered exploitation of the forest region.

The British government decision to pay half of the Ł1.7 million to establish a model system of commercial felling without destroying the rainforest (in Brazil ) and the government of Guyana’s Program for Sustainable Tropical Forestry are licenses to the mining and forestry interests to ravage and decimate the hinterland of both countries.

In Guyana, the issue raises many questions, especially because the country has in the past been spared the consequences of wholesale deforestation.

1. For many years, Amerindians have been seeking freehold rights to lands which are legitimately theirs, without any fulfillment of promises made.

2. They have pointed out that with the Sustainable Forestry Program envisaged by the government, settlements of their people and their people’s livelihoods will be jeopardized.

3. The Amerindians have not been consulted as to their views, nor have the people of Guyana.

4. The Georgetown urban-based government does not possess the necessary supervisory capacity to police the mining and forestry interests to make sure that the resources of the forest are exploited on a sustainable basis.

5. Already the timber interests are planning to double their exports this year.

6. The Government of Guyana, which has extended its life by nearly two years, is not considered to have a mandate for the kind of open door policy to exploitation of the hinterland which it is pursuing.

Amerindians are demanding a stop be put to further initiatives, particularly with the Program of Sustainable rainforests, until a more detailed examination of its consequences is conducted.

Eric Huntley

London, England

Since I wrote my article "Comalco’s Power Play" (Multinational Monitor, June 1991 ), there have been further developments with Comalco. A trade journal has revealed that the power generation unit set up inside head office of Comalco ’s parent, CRA , has been disbanded because of the failure to bring off several projects, including buying the Manapouri power station (or build a coal-fired power station in New Zealand ’s North Island). Comalco has diversified into Chile , where it is investigating a hydro scheme that would flood a national park for a smelter.

Due to a combination of severe drought in the hydro catchment and Electricorp ’s profit-driven mismanagement, New Zealand has been plunging into a severe power crisis. This has occurred, with virtually no warning, in the midst of a particularly severe winter. Hot water is currently cut off for up to 17 hours per day; total blackouts are threatened. Comalco has closed one potline at its Tiwai Point smelter, for a limited period, claiming this is the first time it’s done this anywhere in the world. Commentators point out that the world aluminum price is currently down USS66 per ton, so it is a useful time to stockpile. Electricorp is also paying Comalco up to NZ$10 million of taxpayers’ money, as compensation.

As you also reviewed Roger Moody’s Plunder, we would also like it known that CAFCA (Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa) is co-publisher of this book.

In relation to Robert Reid’s article in the same issue ("Crushing Labor in New Zealand"), it is worth pointing out that Comalco was one of the very first major employers to take advantage of the Employment Contracts Act, and put its workers on deunionized contracts.

Reid’s article had one major omission. The union movement was very slow to act against the New Right revolution enacted under the 1984-90 Labour government, because the NZ Labour Party arose out of the trade unions. There was always a close working relationship between the two; unions funded the party; affiliated unions had bloc voting rights at annual party conferences. The leadership of the NZ Council of Trade Unions maintained loyalty throughout the wholesale assault on workers - just months before Labour’s 1990 electoral oblivion, it signed a deal with the government, agreeing to a 2 percent limit on wage rises.

In 1984, one of Labour’s campaign promises was to "Save Rail." My union (the national union of rail workers) campaigned for Labour and contributed tens of thousands of dollars. Long before Labour’s two terms were up, we had disaffiliated from Labour, which presided over the "downsizing" of NZ Railways staff by 70 percent (including me).

Murray Horton,

Secretary, CAFCA

Christchurch, New Zealand

Between the Lines

Conservation Cover-up

UNDER PRESSURE from the Bush Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this year stopped publishing an annual report which showed new cars’ fuel efficiency could be significantly enhanced without changing car size. A July 2, 1991 letter from Barry Felrice, associate administrator for rulemaking at the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, to Karl Hellman of the Office of Air and Radiation at EPA said, "[W]e are disturbed over the ‘best in class analysis’ which makes it appear that CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] can be greatly improved without changing the size mix of vehicles." The letter was recently made public by the Sierra Club and the Center for Auto Safety (CAS).

A CAS analysis of EPA’s 1992 data showed that the 1992 passenger car fleet would attain an average of 35 miles per gallon (mpg) if every car did as well as the best car in its class, without requiring any new technology or shifts to smaller cars. According to CAS, shifting to a "best-in-class" fleet would save 800,000 barrels of gas per day and would reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 125 million tons. The Sierra Club says that reducing auto pollution is the clearest way to curb threatened global warming, and that raising CAFE standards to 40 mpg will save the average U.S. family $650 per year at the gas pump.

CAS and the Sierra Club are calling on the EPA to restore the annual analysis. Daniel Becker, director of global warming and energy at the Sierra Club, says, "This is an atrocious case of political interference in science. The political hacks in the Bush Administration have pulled the plug on the technical experts at EPA because the facts don’t support the president’s political agenda."

Toxic Relocation

SIX CHEMICAL COMPANIES and a real estate developer have agreed to pay $207.5 million in relocation fees and damages to residents of a Houston, Texas neighborhood poisoned by a toxic waste dump. Area parents blame toxic chemicals dumped in the site for causing severe illnesses in their children, including birth defects and leukemia.

To settle a number of community lawsuits, insurers for Farm Home & Savings Association, the developer of the neighborhood, agreed to buy the houses of 212 families still living near the dump site. The insurer will also pay the families and other plaintiffs in the case $128 million in damages, some of which will go to pay for the college education and health treatment of neighborhood children who attended an elementary school near the dump site.

Six chemical companies which dumped at the site have also agreed to pay damages to residents of the neighborhood. Monsanto , the company which is paying the largest amount, $39 million, buried toxic chemicals in unlined holes in the ground. No defendants admitted to wrongdoing in settling the case.

According to the Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, the settlement over the Houston Superfund site is the largest ever in toxic waste cases in the United States.

Depo-Provera Returns

THE CONTROVERSIAL CONTRACEPTIVE Depo-Provera is likely to become available on the U.S. market following a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel recommendation on June 19 that the FDA approve the use of the injectable drug. Depo- Provera is currently approved for use in the United States as a treatment for endometrial and renal cancers. The drug’s manufacturer, Upjohn, markets Depo-Provera as a contraceptive in over 90 countries.

The FDA has in the past prohibited the use of Depo-Provera as a contraceptive because tests of the drug on dogs and monkeys indicated a link to cancer of the cervix, liver and breast. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), animal and clinical studies further link use of the drug with infertility, diabetes and hypoglycemia, anemia, increased risk of blood clots and excessive bleeding leading to a need for hysterectomies [see The Upjohn Nightmare," Multinational Monitor, November 1991 ]. Recent studies also link Depo-Provera with loss of bone mass, according to NWHN.

In 1991, FDA decided that dogs are not an appropriate model for carcinogenicity studies for steroidal contraceptives to be used by women. In the June hearings, Upjohn presented data to the advisory committee which the FDA says demonstrates that the relationship between Depo-Provera and breast cancer is not strong enough to warrant withholding approval of the drug.

In a statement before the FDA committee, NWHN’s Cynthia Pearson expressed concern that low-income and minority women will be encouraged and perhaps coerced into using the drug if it is approved [see The Case Against Depo-Provera," Multinational Monitor, February/March 1985 ]. "The women’s health movement has already documented many cases of coercion even while Depo-Provera was not approved as a contraceptive," Pearson told the committee. "It is likely that these practices will continue after approval."

- Holley Knaus

Editorial: Who’s to Blame
THE REFUSAL TO ASSIGN BLAME for the world’s ecological and developmental crises was one of the primary reasons for the failure of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).

Most of the UNCED participants who understand that solving social problems requires attention to their root causes argued that environmental degradation was a consequence of three main factors: poverty, overpopulation in the South and overconsumption in the North. "The concentration of population growth in developing countries and economic growth in industrialized countries has deepened," said UNCED Secretary-General Maurice Strong at his opening speech in Rio, "creating imbalances which are unsustainable, either in environmental or economic terms."

The mass of non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives who converged on Rio for Earth Summit-related events, especially those from the Third World, placed a far greater emphasis on Northern responsibility for environmental degradation and Southern poverty.

The North, with somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the world’s population, consumes between 75 and 80 percent of the world’s resources, the Southern NGOs pointed out. It is the industrialized countries’ use of fossil fuels which has contributed most significantly to global warming; Northern nations’ reliance on chlorofluorocarbons which is primarily to blame for ozone depletion; and discharges from Northern industries which have polluted ocean waters.

As importantly, the industrialized countries are largely responsible for the poverty of the Third World. The dominant economic position of industrialized countries enables them to drain vast amounts of resources out of the Third World, in the form of debt repayments, royalties, underpriced commodities and other means. This exploitative relationship locks Third World countries into poverty, the Southern NGOs charged.

In too many cases, however, Northern and Southern NGOs focused narrowly on the consumption levels of individuals in the North, shifting attention away from the main despoilers of the environment - multinational companies. The discussion of individual behavior in Northern countries diverted attention from methods of production and ignored the reality that corporations, more than individuals, establish consumption patterns.

Northern-based corporations are primarily responsible for the world’s biggest environmental problems - among them global warming, ozone depletion, pesticide proliferation and toxic waste - not Northern consumers. Big business also shapes consumer choices, both through advertising and by limiting available technological and consumer alternatives.

Similarly, government and NGO representatives both shied away from denouncing the true power brokers in Third World countries, where wealth disparities are as great as those between nations. A declaration circulated at UNCED by the Brazilian Rural Workers Union stood out for its focus on economic inequality. "Without true agrarian reform, no environmental or democratic policy is possible," the rural workers’ declaration stated. It noted that, in Brazil, 1 percent of landholders control 45 percent of all Brazilian land, and that 13 million rural workers are landless. The battle over access to land has led to 645 killings of rural workers and popular leaders in the last few years, the declaration said.

By comparison, the section on poverty in Agenda 21, UNCED’s blueprint for the future, contains a lot of NGO-like rhetoric about "focusing on the empowerment of local and community groups," but it does not address the issues which currently ensure community residents’ powerlessness, such as unequal land distribution patterns. Accordingly, the section includes no suggestions for how to translate the rhetorical appeals into real-life programs.

As NGOs focus more on global issues, they will have to discuss actors and issues in some general terms. But activists must be careful to specify who is responsible for problems. It is not enough to speak only of North and South, although Northern exploitation is a real and significant source of Third World impoverishment. It is misleading to attack the behavior of individuals in the North, though individuals in industrialized countries do have a responsibility to moderate their consumption. And it is insufficient to lay out poverty alleviation plans, although such plans are sorely needed. Non-governmental activists must recognize that underlying the environmental and development crises are not just North-South inequalities but huge power disparities within countries as well. They must attack those disparities and work to challenge the deadly and destructive practices of corporate and elite interests.

The Front
Working for Less
U.S. WORKERS SAW their real wages fall in the final years of the 1980s economic upswing, even before the onset of the current recession, according to "Declining Wages for High School and College Graduates," a recently released briefing paper prepared by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). In fact, George Bush’s years in office are the only post- war period in which hourly compensation for U.S. workers declined in almost all occupational sectors.

EPI Research Director Lawrence Mishel and EPI economist Jared Bernstein found that, starting in 1987, average real wages and benefits began falling for groups that had enjoyed recent gains, including college-educated and white-collar workers and most women.

These developments coincided with the continuing wage deterioration of those who lost the most during the 1980s: high school graduates, men without college degrees (three-fourths of all employed men), lower-wage women and blue-collar workers. In general, Mishel and Bernstein found, since 1979, the lower the wage group, the more their wages fell. Wages at the twentieth percentile dropped 11.8 percent from 1979 to 1991, while those at the eightieth percentile declined 3.6 percent over the same period.

The single sector to escape the pattern of wage decline has been men with advanced and professional degrees, who account for only the top-salaried 8 percent of men. They are the only group whose wages have risen since 1987.

The report’s authors say that their findings challenge arguments that wage declines are a result of the current economic recession. "Causality may well go in the other direction," says Bernstein.

The trend in wage declines, Mishel and Bernstein argue, was a significant factor in the onset of the recession, because consumer incomes were curtailed. Furthermore, the drop in wages may have contributed to the extremely low level of consumer confidence expressed during the current recession. "Throughout this recession, demand has been extremely weak," Bernstein says. "Unemployment and lack of growth of GDP have been light relative to past recessions. But what’s made this recession as intractable as it is may be that declining wages are depressing consumer demand."

The report suggests that a frequently predicted expansion of skilled technical and white-collar jobs in the 1990s will fail to materialize. The authors say that the recent decline in the wages of college-educated workers, and especially the decline of entry-level wages for young, male and female college graduates, show that growth in employer demand for college graduates has been slowing since 1987.

"A college education is no longer insurance against declining wage trends," says Bernstein. "Wages of high school graduates have been declining noticeably since the 1970s, but it was thought that wage earners with college degrees would escape the trend. However, what we see is that the scope of declining wages is touching people who are college graduates, and their salaries are decreasing as well."

The workforce is not moving up any "income ladder," conclude Mishel and Bernstein. Their findings show that young workers now have fewer and fewer options to earn a decent wage. Wages of entry level jobs for African-American, Latino and white high school graduates are 26 percent lower than they were in 1979. Entry-level wages of college graduates are also falling, and there has been an overall decline in white-collar wages.

Furthermore, women’s wage gains have been subject to significant reversals: the 5.3 percent gain in wages for women over the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989 has been nearly reversed by 14 percent reductions over the past two years. The data in the "Declining Wages" report show that almost all of the recent closing of the wage gap between men and women is due to declines in men’s wages, and not to progress in the wage increases of women.

The report’s findings address several other wage-related issues. Mishel and Bernstein argue that rising health insurance costs are not to blame for declining workers’ compensation. The report indicates that although insurance costs are skyrocketing, average fringe benefit costs for employers have not risen since 1987. As a result of the tremendous growth of jobs with little or no employer-provided health benefits and the shift of employer health care costs on to employees, it is workers who have borne the burden of escalating health care costs.

EPI's findings also shed some light on the affirmative action debate. Entry-level wages of college graduates have fallen more among African-Americans than whites, and all high school graduates’ wages have plummeted "equally severely" according to Bernstein. He says that claims that "preferential treatment" for people of color in the work place has been the cause of wage and opportunity declines among white workers are therefore difficult to substantiate.

The "Declining Wages" report argues that the central challenge facing economic policymakers is providing most workers with decent middle-income earnings and a rising standard of living. "Any set of proposed economic policies should be evaluated based on their ability to restore wage growth for the vast majority of the workforce," state the authors. "It is increasingly clear that, by this standard, recent economic policies must be judged harshly."

- Julie Gozan

Features
Summit Games: Bush Busts UNCED
by Robert Weissman

RIO DE JANEIRO - It was the U.S. government against the world at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio from June 3 to June 14. Having earlier scuttled the climate change treaty by insisting that it contain no specific greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, the Bush administration announced it would not sign the biodiversity treaty just as the Earth Summit got underway. And it held a hard line on other contentious issues at the conference, such as technology transfer and financing of the programs on which the UNCED negotiatiors agreed.

The U.S. belligerence was so extreme that it threw all other players at the conference - other Northern countries, the Third World and the massive number of non- governmental organization (NGO) observers - into a loose coalition, opposed to the United States.

Many participants and observers marvelled at the U.S. government’s bungling, pointing to the fact that it negotiated itself into isolation and united the rest of the world. Many U.S. NGO and congressional representatives attributed the administration’s stance to its desire to solidify its domestic right-wing support in the face of the electoral challenge from Ross Perot. Others, while not disputing this theory, believed the United States was also implementing a more sophisticated strategy.

These observers noted that while the Bush administration’s extremism did polarize the debate, its hardline stance shifted the terms of the debate significantly - in the direction of the U.S. position. Because most UNCED participants did not believe there was value in concluding treaties which excluded the United States, the world’s largest economy and the sole remaining superpower, they were willing to make repeated compromises to mollify the United States. UNCED Secretary-General Maurice Strong expressed this concern, saying, "The United States cannot be isolated. ... America and the fate of the rest of the world cannot be isolated from each other."

Five major documents emerged from the Earth Summit: a Climate Change Convention, a set of Forest Principles, a Biodiversity Convention, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, UNCED’s agenda for the next century. With the partial exception of the Forest Principles, the United States was a drag on the negotiations for each of these documents.

On each of the major areas of dispute, the conference players took positions along the same spectrum. The United States resisted bold initiatives, expressing concerns about the ways that measures to protect the environment might interfere with the workings of the free market or slow economic growth. The other industrialized countries - with the European Community (EC) taking a more aggressive role than Japan - were willing to make some modifications to their current ways of doing business and provide some funding to Third World countries to help them implement the proposals agreed on at UNCED. The Third World - negotiating collectively as the G-77, a grouping which originally consisted of 77 countries - emphasized the overconsumption of Northern countries and widespread global poverty as barriers to attaining worldwide sustainable development. Developing countries also called attention to problems exacerbating global inequality, such as payments on the Third World debt and unfair terms of trade for Third World commodities. NGOs’ positions - by no means uniform - generally came closest to those of the G-77, though the NGOs called for more dramatic changes in economic and social structures, in the Third World as well as globally and in the North.

NGOs were largely alone in arguing that free markets and free trade are incompatible with, and must be subordinate to, ecological sustainability. For the most part, they were also alone in arguing that UNCED had to devise controls on the dominant world economic actors, multinational corporations, if it hoped to preserve the environment and promote sustainable development. Some Third World countries sought to put these issues on the UNCED agenda, but, with the overwhelming world trend toward eliminating rather than imposing new controls on corporate activity, they did not find a receptive audience at the Earth Summit. U.S. negotiators quickly rebuffed proposals to regulate business, and Third World negotiators quietly capitulated in this crucial area.

The U.S. success in watering down the Earth Summit treaties, UNCED’s failure to take even modest steps to control multinationals or challenge the world economic structure and the conference’s failure to address a number of specific issues, such as nuclear power, led many NGOs to denounce the Earth Summit as a failure.

"We hold no hope for governments in the short term," said Greenpeace’s Tani Adams. Solutions for the major planetary crises will have to come from citizens, if they are to emerge at all, she argued.

Cool reception on global warming

The Climate Change Convention negotiations offer the best example of how the United States succeeded in controlling the Earth Summit’s terms of debate.

With the United States sticking to its hardline position in negotiations prior to UNCED and George Bush threatening not to attend the conference, the rest of the world’s nations backed down from their plan to establish specific emission reduction targets in the climate change treaty. The final agreement called on countries to make their best effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but did not set a goal of achieving 1990 levels by the year 2000 - a standard around which all countries but the United States had achieved consensus.

Most UNCED participants, while stating that they had wanted the Climate Change Convention to contain specific targets, hailed the agreement as an important first step in addressing what many consider the world’s foremost environmental problem. The remarks of Finland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Paavo Vayrynen in an address to UNCED were typical. "The Framework Convention on Climate Change contains commitments and elements which create a good basis for national efforts and enhanced global cooperation to mitigate the consequences of climate change," he said.

Some offered harsher criticisms of the United States. The EC Environment Commissioner refused to attend the Earth Summit because of the U.S. gutting of the Climate Change Convention. In a special UNCED publication, he wrote that the Rio meeting "was intended to take decisions, obtain precise and concrete commitments to counteract tendencies that are endangering life on the planet."

The Bush administration received a diplomatic slap for its stand on global warming-related issues from the European Community, which announced during the Earth Summit that its 12 members had reached an internal agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.

The strongest governmental denunciation of the U.S. position on global warming came from Malaysia , which argued that the United States and other industrialized countries had no right to dictate environmental instructions to the Third World without addressing their own ecological culpability. "After all, the North consumes roughly four-fifths of global resources, and it is also responsible for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of contamination of the earth," said Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Dato’ Abdullah Haji Ahmad Badawi. Until the United States and other industrialized countries change their wasteful production and consumption patterns and help Third World countries develop, he argued, they "do not have the moral authority to tell the rest of the world to save resources and to stop pollution."

NGOs joined in the criticism of the United States. Lester Brown of the U.S.-based Worldwatch Institute, referring to the proposal to mandate greenhouse gas reductions to 1990 levels by 2000, said, "We [the United States] should have been there." Brown argued that signing the treaty would not have entailed any sacrifices for the United States, because market-driven implementation of energy-efficient technolgies will lead U.S. energy use to fall below current levels before 2000.

While most NGOs approved of any concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they held that even the European Community’s commitment fell far short of the steps needed. A non-governmental agreement on climate change, negotiated among NGOs at the Global Forum, a parallel conference to the Earth Summit, called for industrialized countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2005 - a goal to which Germany has committed itself - and to pursue measures which ultimately reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent. A recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change, a group of 300 international scientists, says that without a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, global warming may spin out of control.

Biodiversity bombshell

The biggest bombshell at the conference was the Bush administration’s announcement that it would not sign the Biodiversity Convention.

This Convention requires all signatories to develop national plans to identify the biodiversity located within their borders and to establish protected areas to conserve that biodiversity. It closely links the protection of biodiversity with the development of biotechnology, which relies on diverse species as genetic raw material.

The Bush administration objected to mild constraints which the Convention imposes on the biotechnology industry. Bush told the Earth Summit that the treaty "threatens to retard biotechnology and undermine the protection of ideas." He added, "It is never easy to stand alone on principle, but sometimes leadership requires that you do."

The United States complained specifically about provisions of the treaty which call on signatories to ensure that intellectual property rights "are supportive of and do not run counter to [this Convention’s] objectives." Strengthening intellectual property protection has been a high priority of the Bush administration, and it was loathe to subordinate that effort to environmental and social criteria. The administration also objected to provisions in the treaty requiring biotechnology transfer to developing countries that provide genetic resources for biotechnology research and to the financing scheme proposed in the Convention.

The U.S. action, coming on top of its gutting of the Climate Change Convention, shocked and angered UNCED participants. Even U.S. allies condemned the U.S. position. "It is disappointing that the United States has so far not indicated they will sign [the Biodiversity Convention]," said Ros Kelly, leader of Australia’s UNCED delegation. "I urge them to do so, if not in the interest of the living things of the planet, then in their own self interest. ... We are the dominant species on the planet, but we depend for our continued survival on all the others."

The effect of the U.S. announcement on biodiversity was to spur other countries to rush to sign the treaty. By the end of the conference, more than 100 countries had signed the Convention. By holding out, some observers believe, the United States succeeded in uniting the rest of the world behind a flawed treaty which contains significant advantages for the biotechnology industry.

While NGOs had been instrumental in pushing for a Biodiversity Convention and NGOs in Rio unanimously criticized the U.S. position, many expressed serious doubts about the merits of the final draft of the treaty, particularly with regard to its implications for the development of biotechnology.

o "Nothing in the convention indicates respect for the rights of indigenous people," said Victoria Corpuz, of the Cordillera People’s Alliance in the Philippines. Nor does the treaty contain any guarantees for Third World farming communities. Indigenous people and Third World farmers have played a crucial role in identifying and developing (through plant breeding done over long periods of time) useful genetic strains. These groups worry that biotechnology companies will modify the seeds they have nurtured through the years without providing them with any royalties.

o Many NGOs charged that the Convention and the section in Agenda 21 on biotechnology fail to provide adequate environmental and health safeguards. Philip Berreano of the U.S. Biotechnology Working Group asked, "Do we need to have a biotech Chernobyl or Bhopal before we come to our senses" and take steps to regulate the industry? A group of non-governmental activists at the Global Forum, including Berreano, drafted a set of "Citizens’ Commitments on Biotechnology." Among other provisions, that document called for "protection for the environment by requiring scientifically sound, long-range, ecological assessment at every stage of biotechnology" and the application of the precautionary principle to biotechnology, "which means that as along as the impacts are in doubt or uncertain, biotechnology activities should not be undertaken."

o After a careful examination of the final draft of the Biodiversity Convention, a number of Third World NGOs concluded that, the U.S. position notwithstanding, the treaty might provide too much intellectual property protection for multinational biotechnology companies and too few protections for Third World countries, the source of most of the world’s biodiversity.

At issue are the seeds stored in international gene banks. (Despite the common U.S. association of the concept of biodiversity with endangered animal species, the number of plant species is far greater than the number of animal species. And it is plants’ genetic material, much more so than animals’, which is expected to provide the material for the biotechnology revolution.) Two-thirds of all seeds collected in gene banks - most of them donated by Third World countries - are estimated to be stored in gene banks controlled by Northern countries or those of the World Bank-affiliated International Agricultural Research Center (IARC) network. Third World NGOs fear that the Biodiversity Convention will enable Northern multinational corporations to gain exclusive control of these genes.

The ownership of the seeds in gene banks has been unclear, with most of the seeds originating in developing countries but housed in Northern nations. However, at a meeting in Nairobi on May 22, prior to the Earth Summit, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research decided to promote the patenting of materials stored in the IARCs. Because the final draft of the biodiversity treaty does not address ownership of gene-bank material, Southern NGOs fear the IARCs will enter into arrangements with multinational biotechnology corporations that will enable the companies to gain control of this material and genetically modified versions of it without any requirements that they pay royalties to Southern countries from which genetic raw material comes or that they make the new products available at affordable rates.

Non-IARC gene banks located in industrialized countries are likely to follow in the IARCs’ footsteps and patent the seeds they house, the Third World NGOs fear. Although the treaty confers certain rights on the "countries of origin" of genetic materials, based on a careful reading of the "definitions" section of the Biodiversity Convention, a briefing paper prepared by the Malaysia-based Third World Network asserts that "a country hosting gene banks could ... argue that it was a country of origin of the genetic resources, and not only the country from where the resources had naturally evolved."

The combined result of the treaty not addressing the ownership of seeds currently stored in gene banks and its unorthodox definition of country of origin is likely to be that "the South will lose billions of dollars of germplasm," argues Nicolas Perlas, a Philippine expert on biodiversity issues. He charges that the treaty will enable "the United States and developed countries to come out with advantages over the South."

The problems the NGOs cited with the Biodiversity Convention are in large part attributable to the negotiating strategy of the United States. It participated in the treaty negotiations up to the end and succeeded in watering the treaty down, only to reject it. Many NGOs predicted the United States will ultimately sign on to the Convention, but only after convincing the signatories to further modify it. "The United States is playing poker with the world, betting that other countries will throw in all their chips, and then asking for a little more," said David Hattaway of the Brazil Non-Governmental Organization Forum. The question for "Brazil and the other G-77 countries is how long they will keep playing poker, and playing poker like fools."

Forest fraud

To counter its isolation at the conference, the Bush administration worked hard to achieve a set of "Forest Principles" - downgraded from an initially hoped-for Forest Convention - and announced a "Forests for the Future Initiative." The initiative proposes to double worldwide international forest conservation assistance to $2.7 billion. As a "down payment" on the initiative, the administration announced that the United States will increase bilateral forestry assistance by $150 million each year.

U.S. NGOs denounced the Bush forest proposals as hypocritical and insufficient. "It’s just incredible," said Brock Evans, vice president for national issues of the National Audubon Society, "that at the same time Bush is offering U.S. funds for world forest assistance, he is aggressively pushing legislation to exterminate nearly 70 percent of our own remaining ancient forests and to emasculate our Endangered Species Act." The Forests for the Future Initiative "is such an obviously transparent ploy," said Bill Mankin, head of Sierra Club’s Earth Summit delegation. "This initiative is a year late, at least three and a half billion dollars short, and is practically guaranteed to offend developing countries."

The Bush administration’s focus on forests did indeed offend may developing countries. In emphasizing forests’ function as carbon sinkholes, Bush clearly hoped to divert attention from the U.S. role in sabotaging the climate change treaty. This drew the ire of Third World countries, which demanded that the United States limit its world- leading contribution to the greenhouse effect before calling on poorer countries which are less responsible for global warming to undertake efforts to combat the problem.

Malaysia, which is rapidly destroying its rainforests in the states of Sabah and Sarawak, led the charge against the United States in the negotiating rooms and in the plenary sessions. India and others joined in, asserting that environmental protection measures must not interfere with their right to use their forests and other natural resources to promote development.

The eventually agreed upon Forest Principles reflected the aggressive opposition to what these Third World countries called infringements on their sovereignty. The final draft recognizes states’ "sovereign and inalienable right to utilize, manage and develop their forests in accordance with their development needs." It does not contain a strong commitment to preserving natural forests, emphasizing reforestation as much as forest preservation.

From the NGO perspective, no government parties took a positive or admirable position in the forest debate.

NGOs agreed that the United States and other Northern countries have a primary moral obligation to curtail their greenhouse gas emissions and other environmentally degrading activities, and to address global economic inequities in order to relieve the pressure on developing countries to overexploit their resources. And the more critical NGO activists challenged the whole notion of environmental aid as the key element to saving the forests. Vandana Shiva, an Indian author and ecologist, predicted that the U.S. Forests for the Future monies would - as earlier funds from the World Bank for forest conservation have done - subsidize industrial concerns expropriating and planting trees on peasants’ land. Corporate tree plantations, she stressed, are not forests - they do not protect the soil (and in fact may harm it, as is the case with eucalyptus trees) or support biologically diverse ecosystems.

But the NGOs also rejected the argument of Malaysia and India that Third World countries have the right to destroy their forests in the name of development. A document circulated by the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) stated, "The conservation of all remaining natural and primary forests worldwide ... is ecologically essential since there is little natural forest left." The rainforest network called for an eventual moratorium on commercial logging and a halt to colonization schemes and processes, such as programs to convert forests to ranges for cattle ranching.

Programs to protect the forest, the WRM statement said, must secure "the basic rights of local peoples, including indigenous and forest peoples and other communities that depend on forests," and must also address the social and economic causes which contribute to deforestation. The WRM statement calls for assurances of land security for small and landless rural farmers, which would reduce pressure on forests, and for financial compensation, through means such as debt relief, to Third World countries that take steps to protect their forests and forego income from forest exploitation.

Agenda 21

Agenda 21 was the most comprehensive and elaborate of the documents agreed upon at the Earth Summit. Its goal was to provide "a blueprint for action in all areas relating to sustainable development of the planet from now until the twenty-first century." The more than 800-page document contains sections on poverty, consumption patterns, population growth, desertification, mountain ecosystems, ocean ecology, toxic chemicals and more than a dozen other areas.

Most NGOs found at least parts of Agenda 21 worthy of applause. "Agenda 21 has moved us forward 10 years" on sectoral issues, said Peter Padbury of the Forum of International Non-Governmental Organizations, adding, however, that it failed to adequately deal with most global problems. Undoubtedly, the United States and other countries allowed much of the pro-environment language to remain in Agenda 21 because the document, unlike the Climate Change and Biodiversity Conventions, is not binding on signatories.

There were a number of disputes over Agenda 21 at Rio, but the most heated was over the issue of financing. Secretary-General Strong estimated the overall cost of the programs included in Agenda 21 for developing countries to be $600 billion a year, and he called on Northern countries to provide $125 billion of that, a $70 billion increase on top of the $55 billion already sent from North to South in overseas development aid (ODA).

The Rio meeting confirmed what had long been apparent: industrialized countries have no intention of quickly meeting that goal. The United States early announced its intention to provide $150 million in new monies for forestry products, and the EC pledged $4 billion by the end of the conference. Japan promised to increase its ODA from $3.1 billion over the last three years to above $7 billion over the next five. Altogether, new pledges totaled between $6 and $7 billion a year.

The subject of debate in Rio was how strictly, and by what deadline, Northern countries should be held to the $125 billion target. The language which was eventually agreed upon amounted to something of a victory for Third World countries. It called on Northern countries to reaffirm their commitment to a longstanding UN goal of providing .7 percent of their GNPs to ODA, and to aim to meet that target by the year 2000. That agreement was possible because the United States has never agreed to the .7 percent goal, and so it was not required to "reaffirm" that commitment.

A debate of perhaps even more significance took place over what means, besides bilateral, country-to-country transfers, should be used to transfer aid from North to South. Third World countries called for the creation of a Green Fund which would be democratically run, with equal representation from industrialized and developing countries. Northern countries rebuffed this proposal, instead advocating use of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), a recently created fund which is administered jointly by the World Bank, the UN Development Program and the UN Environment Program, but primarily controlled by the World Bank.

Southern countries objected to the GEF because it is run in the undemocratic fashion of the World Bank, with voting shares going to its funder (Northern) countries to the exclusion of the recipients of funds (Third World countries). Ultimately, the UNCED negotiators agreed that the GEF would be one of the mechanisms to transfer aid, with others including multilateral banks, United Nations agencies and debt relief. The World Bank also promised that democratic reforms of the GEF were underway.

For NGOs, the issue of the GEF was of critical importance. The aid under discussion was far too little to address the environmental and developmental needs of the South, and it pales in comparison to the $200 billion transferred annually from South to North in the form of debt repayments, royalty payments and unfair international terms of trade, said Martin Khor, director of the Third World Network. "In this situation," he explained, "aid becomes a symbol rather than a solution." And the symbolic importance of UNCED’s reliance on the GEF instead of a Green Fund was that it signified the power being appropriated by the industralized country-controlled Bretton Woods institutions - the World Bank , the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - at the expense of UN-affiliated bodies, which are more open to influence from Third World countries and which are run more democratically.

Many NGOs also objected strongly to the notion of placing responsibility for environmental protection with the World Bank, a major funder of dams, roads and agricultural and forestry programs that have had horrific environmental impacts. The World Bank is "an inappropriate institution for a new era of environmental development," wrote Vandana Shiva, because it "is a primary agent of environmental destruction [and] it has no experience on environmental recovery and ecological planning."

The Rio Declaration

The document originally envisioned as an Earth Charter, laying out basic principles of ecological stewardship of the planet, was watered down to a Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in the negotiations leading up to the Earth Summit. The final Declaration sacrificed the Earth Charter’s hoped-for eloquence and inspirational language, but it incorporated key concerns of the South, including Third World countries’ "right to development."

Negotiators finalized the Rio Declaration before the Rio Conference, so it was not a focus of attention during the conference. However, during UNCED, the United States threatened to reopen negotiations on the Declaration. That threat increased U.S. negotiating leverage on other issues, again shifting the Earth Summit debate in the direction of U.S. interests.

Unsaid at UNCED

Even more important than how the United States shifted the debate at UNCED was what was kept off the UNCED agenda all together. In some instances, the United States alone was responsible for ensuring that key topics were kept out of the debate; in other cases, the United States was joined by other industrialized countries and the Third World in what amounted to a government conspiracy against the world’s people and enviroment.

An April 1992 "NGO Declaration: 10 Point Plan to Save the Earth Summit," sponsored by Greenpeace, the Forum of Brazilian NGOs (representing 1,200 groups), Friends of the Earth and the Third World Network and endorsed by dozens of other groups, laid out a list of steps the Earth Summit would have to take in order "to address the huge environment and development problems the world faces." These steps included: imposing binding reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions; changing the North’s consumption patterns and technologies; commiting to economic reform to reverse the South-North outflow of resources; removing the GEF from World Bank control; regulating the activities of multinational corporations; banning the export of hazardous wastes and technologies; saving existing forests (as opposed to merely planting new trees); halting nuclear weapons testing and rapidly phasing out nuclear power; devising strict safety standards to control biotechnology research and application; and reconciling trade practices with environmental protection and social, political and economic concerns.

To no one’s surprise, UNCED negotiators did not revise their work to incorporate the issues raised by the NGO Declaration. Nor did they deal with critical issues involving the military - such as how military spending diverts resources from social needs or the environmental effects of military operations and war - or class divisions within nations that generate unsustainable economic and social policies, in both the North and South.

UNCED’s legacy

A common refrain in Rio was: "At least the Earth Summit will raise the world’s environmental consciousness." With thousands of journalists reporting on UNCED, that hope will undoubtedly be realized in part. But the educational value of UNCED may be limited, and the broad historical memory of it short.

The conference largely ignored the most important structural economic issues - debt, trade and foreign investment - underlying the environmental and development crises. And it failed to identify or take any steps to rein in the major despoilers of the environment - multinational corporations and military forces. Without a coherent analysis of the world’s environmental and development crises, animated by a focus on the responsible culprits, most of the work and debate that took place at the conference on specific environmental issues is likely to be quickly forgotten.

The gathering of so many world leaders in Rio was an historic opportunity to change the suicidal course of the planet. That opportunity was lost, and it is not likely to repeat itself soon.

Sidebar

Green Walk-out
RIO DE JANEIRO - For two weeks in June, Rio billed itself as the "Environmental Capital of the World." Some Rio residents found the claim highly hypocritical.

Workers at the State Foundation of Environmental Engineering (FEEMA) in Rio de Janeiro (the city is located in a state of the same name) went on strike on May 25. Members of the FEEMA Workers Association (ASFEEMA) say they have not received wage adjustments since 1990, despite Brazil’s runaway inflation; inflation rose approximately 1,000 percent in 1991 alone.

The workers charge that the state government is systematically gutting their agency in order to promote the interests of developers and polluting industries. An "Open Letter to the Population" from ASFEEMA asserts, "There are many contrary interests that want to see the ‘DEATH’ of FEEMA."

During the Earth Summit, one ASFEEMA representative told Multinational Monitor that the state government had not responded constructively to the ASFEEMA strike, apparently preferring to ignore it as long as possible.

The workers’ response was to turn to the public, as well as the attendees of the Earth Summit. ASFEEMA’s "Open Letter" - distributed at the non-governmental Global Forum which accompanied the Earth Summit - asked the public to "join our fight, for on it depends the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat. Remember: Your life depends on it!"

- R.W.

Sidebar

Human Rights and the Environment
RIO DE JANEIRO - The murder of Chico Mendes, leader of rubber tapper workers in Northwest Brazil and a defender of the Amazon rainforest, brutally illustrated the connection between environmental advocacy and human rights.

"Defending the Earth: Abuses of Human Rights and the Environment," a report issued jointly by Human Rights Watch and the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) at the Earth Summit, makes clear that the murder of Mendes was not an isolated incident. In "countries around the world, human rights abuses continue to shield environmental abuses - and block meaningful and effective efforts to deal with them," the report states. Human Rights Watch and NRDC claim their report is the first to demonstrate the worldwide abuses of the human rights of environmental activists, in both industrialized and developing countries.

Threats, harassment, physical intimidation and occasionally even assassination attempts are generally directed at activists, governmental officials and journalists who not only draw attention to environmental degradation but seek to identify and hold accountable the despoilers of the environment.

"Eventually [environmentalists] have to ask the questions: who made the mess that I am cleaning up, and why?" says Professor Wangari Muta Maathai of Kenya. "It is in trying to answer those questions that you get in trouble. [Because] those messing up the environment are powerful," she says. Maathai is a leader of the country’s opposition forces and the founder and director of the grassroots Green Belt Movement, which has organized tens of thousands of women to plant and maintain more than 10 million trees in order to combat soil erosion, provide fuelwood for rural people and build women’s self- esteem.

Maathai has been harassed, tear-gassed, beaten and arrested for her environmental work. The Kenyan special police have labeled Maathai and the Green Belt Movement "subversive," according to "Defending the Earth," and the government has reacted particularly sharply to her efforts opposing the construction of a 62-story building in downtown Nairobi’s largest green space.

The report details numerous other human rights abuses of environmental activists who challenge powerful public and private interests, including:

o The continuing terror in Brazil against organizers of rural workers whose interests run contrary to those of large landowners. From January 1964 to January 1992, 1,681 rural workers in Brazil were killed. In 1991, 54 rural workers were killed, 88 wounded in conflicts over land and 253 threatened with death. Those figures actually represent a decrease from previous years, but Human Rights Watch and NRDC fear the drop may only be a temporary decline in the wake of publicity over the killing of Chico Mendes. The legal system constitutes little deterrent; in 1991, authorities prosecuted only six of those responsible for the violence in rural Brazil, obtaining convictions in four instances. As Aíanagildo Matos of the Rubber Tappers Union says, "Here in Brazil we have freedom of expression - but the people who commit murders remain free." An appellate court has even overturned the conviction of the father of the father-and-son team found guilty of killing Mendes, and has ordered a new trial.

o The Philippine military’s October 1991 killing of Father Nery Lito Satur, a priest who had waged an anti-logging campaign, and July 1991 murder of Henry Domoldol, the head of a community association working to keep forests under the management of indigenous peoples. Numerous other activists and journalists who have reported on illegal mining and logging frequently receive death threats and are subjected to harassment by the military and private militias. Authorities have also arbitrarily arrested other activists working to save forests in the Philippines, notably members of the environmental organization Haribon.

o The placement under house arrest of Benin ’s health minister, Andre Atchade. The government detained Atchade for protesting plans for the country to import 50 million tons of chemical waste, most of it toxic, from a British corporation.

o The frequent harassment of whistleblowers at U.S. Department of Energy- operated nuclear weapons facilities, and U.S. corporations’ increasing use of slander and libel suits - known as SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) - as a means to curtail environmental activists’ free speech.

A striking commonality in many of the cases detailed in "Defending the Earth" is governments’ resort to claims of protecting "national security" as a means to cover up environmental degradation and silence environmental activists. In the United States, the Department of Energy has used the cloak of national security to justify withholding information on environmental and safety problems at nuclear weapons facilities. In India, the government has invoked the Official Secrets Act - which allows the central or state governments to "prohibit" certain areas if they determine that "information with respect thereto or the destruction or obstruction thereof or interference therewith would be useful to an enemy" - to stifle protests against the massive Narmada dam project. The government has used the Official Secrets Act to ban activists from 33 villages in areas which will be submerged by the dam and to arrest opponents of the dam. In Malaysia, the government has labeled indigenous people and environmental activists trying to protect the forests of the states of Sabah and Sarawak the country’s "Number 1 traitors" and "communist stooge[s]."

Members of both Human Rights Watch and NRDC hope that, by focusing attention on human rights abuses of environmental activists, "Defending the Earth" and future collaborative efforts between human rights and environmental organizations will help protect the political space environmental advocates need to be critical of their governments and business interests in their society.

Anderson Mutang Urud, founder of the Sarawak Indigenous People’s Alliance in Malaysia, knows first-hand the positive effect of international attention on human rights abusers. The Malaysian government arrested Mutang Urud in February 1992 under the authority of its Emergency Ordinance. Held in solitary confinement, interrogated for hours on end and denied medical care, Mutang Urud was released after one month. He attributes his release to international attention and support.

Defending activists like Mutang Urud is important not only to enable them to advocate for their local and national causes, "Defending the Earth" argues, but also to make it possible for them to hold national governments accountable for the commitments they make in international forums like the Earth Summit - where the focus on international issues diverted attention away from the national records of the countries involved in the treaty negotiations. "The ability of the international community to address global environmental problems, such as climate change and biological impoverishment," the report states, "will depend ultimately upon the empowerment of concerned citizens in every country to assure that national governments fulfill their international commitments."

- R.W.

Feature
The Corporate Capture of the Earth Summit
by Kenny Bruno

RIO DE JANEIRO - In his last press conference as Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Maurice Strong admitted that he was "really disappointed" in the failures of the Earth Summit. But he left unanswered - and unasked - the question of why the conference had failed. As people around the world attempt to understand why their governments did not implement measures to address the environmental and development crises, they should look closely at the influence of the world’s most powerful economic actors, multinational corporations (also known as transnational corporations or TNCs).

Earth Summit negotiatiors set their goal as nothing less than moving the course of human activities onto a sustainable path. Given this lofty objective, it would have been logical to confront multinational corporations, since they are the entities primarily responsible for ozone depletion, global warming, toxic contamination, pesticide proliferation, international trade in hazards and other practices which threaten human health and the environment.

Instead, throughout the UNCED process, corporations enjoyed special access to the Secretariat, and the final UNCED documents treat them deferentially.

Corporate influence on the Earth Summit undermined Agenda 21, rendered the Climate Convention toothless and weakened the Biodiversity Convention, which was nonetheless rejected by the United States. In addition, through an enormous public relations drive, corporate leaders themselves attempted to take over the UNCED stage to claim that they have voluntarily turned the corner onto a new path of sustainability.

The business vision of this "new" path still centers around economic growth, with free trade and open markets as prerequisites. Meanwhile, business leaders envision linking environmental protection to profitability, through a system in which all of nature is priced and patented. This is "sustainable development" according to the global corporations. And in Rio, UNCED - made up of representatives of virtually every government in the world - came close to adopting this vision of free market environmentalism as its own.

Maurice Strong: businessman as environmentalist

The choice of Maurice Strong - a multi-millionaire Canadian businessman with interests in oil, real estate, mining and ecotourism - as UNCED Secretary-General was an early sign that the business perspective would have extraordinary clout at UNCED. In his opening speech to an UNCED preparatory conference in New York, Strong laid his philosophy on the table and called on UNCED to be compatible with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an international trade agreement which emphasizes open markets and is strongly supported by internationally oriented companies. This emphasis on free trade is embodied in Principle 12 of the Rio Declaration and allows GATT to cast its shadow over UNCED. As Kristen Dawkins of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy says, "UNCED has bought the TNCs’ plan for free trade to reign supreme over environmental protection in the New World Order. Principle 12 has the power to render environmental agreements moot."

Strong never denied close links with business during the UNCED process. At one meeting in Rio, he responded to criticism of this special relationship by saying, "How can we achieve [sustainable development] without the participation of business?"

The Business Council for Sustainable Development

Early in the UNCED process, Strong appointed Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny as his chief advisor for business and industry. Schmidheiny in turn gathered 48 top executives from companies like Du Pont , Shell , Dow , Ciba-Geigy and Mitsubishi to form the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD). The centerpiece of the BCSD’s energetic effort was the book Changing Course, which lays out the multinational corporate vision of free-market environmentalism.

Throughout the UNCED process, the BCSD had special access to Strong, access which was unavailable to non-governmental organizations, trade unions and groups representing women, youth, farmers and indigenous peoples. Strong even reported that he and Du Pont Chief Executive Officer Edgar Woolard had edited a chapter of Changing Course together.

Strong’s role as an apologist for industry intensified in the week before the official opening of UNCED. On the Friday before UNCED officially began, Strong could be found at a BCSD press conference, watching a high-tech Kodak-produced slide show of Brazilian flora, and fawning over Schmidheiny and the BCSD. "No contribution [to UNCED] has been more important than yours," he told Schmidheiny in front of scores of reporters.

ICC guts Agenda 21

Two days earlier, with the presence of the King and Queen of Sweden drawing a flock of photographers, Strong delivered a similar paean to the plenary session of a 3-day meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The "deep appreciation" of the secretary-general was even more striking in this context, since the ICC has been a leading lobby against proposals to regulate the environmental practices of businesses.

During the fourth UNCED preparatory committee meeting in New York, Sweden and Norway introduced detailed Agenda 21 proposals. Based on recommendations of the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations, the proposals included some of the very same measures supported by the BCSD and ICC in written policies. However, after lobbying by ICC members back in Stockholm and in New York, these proposals were dropped. The final draft of Agenda 21 contains no proposals for controlling multinational corporations. Instead, it discusses the important role business and industry have to play in environmental protection and emphasizes voluntary measures that corporations are already taking.

This type of tactic was typical of the strategies used by the BCSD and ICC throughout the UNCED. While the slick and highly visible BCSD publicized its commitment to full environmental cost accounting, the ICC lobbied to remove such accounting measures from Agenda 21. While the BCSD touted the "changing course" of industry, the ICC systematically made sure that no changes harmful to its interests were made. About half of the BCSD companies are on the board of the ICC.

The Climate Convention

Three hundred scientists from 40 countries make up the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their report "Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment," states explicitly that the only hope for avoiding unprecedented and ecologically disastrous global warming is to make deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. The Climate Convention, which does not obligate any country to emissions reductions, therefore ranks as one of UNCED’s most devastating failures.

In part, the weakness of the Convention represents the payoff of the work of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby which was active throughout the two-year negotiating process. At the last session of the pre-conference negotiations, the Coalition passed out fliers which claimed, contrary to all the evidence amassed by the IPCC, that no environmental benefit will be achieved by stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions.

Shell and Du Pont, both members of the Coalition, are also members of the BCSD, and claim to embrace the "precautionary approach" to global warming. But a look underneath the fancy green language of "eco-efficiency," "no-regrets," and "precautionary principles," reveals that the oil industry still plans to burn "all the oil" it can find. After the BCSD press conference in Rio, Italian oil giant ENI President Gabriele Cagliari was asked if the world can burn all the oil on the planet and call it sustainable. Cagliari, who is also a BCSD member, squirmed slightly and answered, "Yes."

The Biodiversity Convention

On June 7, with the Rio conference less than half over, Schmidheiny, Cagliari and the other BCSD executives who had come to Rio left town, saying their work was done. Indeed it was. Two days earlier, the New York Times printed a leaked memo revealing that the White House had rejected the recommendation of William Reilly, chief administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the leader of the U.S. delegation in Rio, to allow Brazil to try to renegotiate the biodiversity treaty, preferring to reject the treaty outright. Pointing out that he is "the president of the United States, not president of the world," President Bush explained that "in biodiversity it is important to protect our rights, our business rights."

The BCSD may have left town, but Bush was watching out for business interests. It was the corporations involved in biotechnology, including BCSD member companies like Du Pont and Ciba-Geigy, whose concerns about profits from intellectual property rights had prompted Bush to sabotage the Biodiversity Convention.

Business sponsorship of UNCED

Business influence was pervasive at UNCED in subtler ways as well. A handful of big companies, including Ashai Glass , Atlantic Richfield , ICI , Swatch and 3M , were major funders of Ecofund, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit group set up to help finance the conference.

Business sponsorship extended to the Global Forum, the huge alternative summit for non-governmental organizations. A report released by a group of student activists during UNCED detailed the environmentally destructive practices of Global Forum sponsors Petrobras , the Brazilian oil company, and Companhia Vale Do Rio Doce, a major Brazilian mining company.

Whether companies knew it or not, big business even had a man working for its interests in one of the more remote corners of the Rio meetings, the non-governmental organizations’ negotiations of a treaty on TNCs [see "Citizen Summit"]. But the negotiations coordinator for the TNC treaty turned out to be Patrick McNamara, a representative of a group called "Business Transformations." This group is dedicated to working "with business" to help industries incorporate values such as "love, compassion [and] environmental protection," into their operations. After a struggle with others interested more in how to control TNCs than in how to raise the consciousness of business executives, McNamara agreed to relinquish his role as coordinator, but continued to attend meetings of the group.

TNCs, development and Rocinha

UNCED’s official pro-multinational corporation rationale is that these companies are the engines of economic growth which will provide resources for environmental protection and jobs for eliminating poverty. Rio was an interesting site for UNCED, because the poverty which "development" is meant to eradicate is on grotesque display. On their way to and from the conference each day, thousands of delegates and journalists passed through a tunnel underneath Rocinha, Latin America’s largest favela, or shantytown, which is built on one of Rio’s dramatic limestone hills.

On the first Saturday during the conference, NGO representatives and reporters gathered in Rocinha, high above the Hotel Intercontinental, where a week earlier, ICC executives had expressed pious concern for the world’s poor. In a neighborhood Samba school, the NGO members listened to community leaders describe what UNCED had meant to them- tanks, soldiers, one disappearance and two killings since the Brazilian government increased security for the conference.

Compared to other similar places, Rocinha is a success story. After a tough struggle over the last few years, the shantytown’s residents have seen some improvements in living conditions: it is no longer run by drug dealers, some of the neighborhoods are prospering and a leading candidate for mayor is from the favela. Nevertheless, the entire economy of Rocinha, including its schools, hospitals and sewage systems, is outside the official economy, and the signs of poverty are everywhere. It is a giant reminder of how growth and development, anachronistically peddled by multinational corporations and the World Bank at Rio, have failed to trickle even a minimal portion of wealth down to millions of people in Brazil and around the world.

Next on the TNC agenda: GATT vs. UNCED

But UN and government officials seem to have ignored the failure of the market era and economic growth to provide environmental protection and eradicate poverty. By the time UNCED was over, multinational corporate executives could happily note that they had prevented international governmental meddling in corporate affairs and ushered in the era of free market environmentalism. Big business will now be relatively free to pursue its full agenda in the current GATT negotiations.

Judging from Rio, there will be opposition. Before the conference, non- governmental organizations aggressively challenged the role of multinational corporations in UNCED, starting with the release of a pamphlet called the "Greenpeace Book on Greenwash," an exposé of the BCSD and the environmental records of nine prominent companies. Two days later, when the BCSD began its meeting in Copacabana, the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior blockaded the port of BCSD member Aracruz Celulosa and a coalition of indigenous people and Aracruz workers protested company policies. Almost every day saw a new counterattack against multinationals, and skeptics of corporate environmentalism from North and South sprouted up everywhere in the Global Forum.

The world’s governments let corporate greenwash taint UNCED, but the thousands of NGOs gathered in Rio were resentful of the special influence corporations grabbed for themselves at the conference. The move into the era of free trade and free market environmentalism will only intensify the battle between environmentalists and multinational corporations. As Indian ecologist and feminist Vandana Shiva told a group discussing multinationals’ role at UNCED, "Governments have abdicated their responsibilities; now it’s between TNCs and citizens to fight it out directly."

Sidebar

The Merchants of UNCED
"The environment is not going to be saved by environmentalists. Environmentalists do not hold the levers of economic power."

-Maurice Strong, UNCED Secretary-General

"We believe there must be further development in the whole world. We need growth to overcome inefficient behavior. It is an apparent paradox but I think once you understand what it means, you’ll find out that it’s true."

-Stephan Schmidheiny, chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development

RIO DE JANEIRO - Confronted with the avalanche of green rhetoric that fell upon the Earth Summit, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Secretary-General Maurice Strong and his leading collaborator, Stephan Schmidheiny, chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, are businessmen first, environmentalists second. Their grip on the helm of the UNCED process culminated a decades-long evolution in their careers, a path that led through such grimy industrial landscapes as the oil fields of Canada , chemical waste sites in Nova Scotia and the steel mills of Chile . It included tenure in the executive suites and boardrooms of some of the world’s largest banks and corporations.

These two merchants have left an unmistakable philosophical mark on the UNCED process, one that transcends both logic and the historical record. Despite its leading role in trashing the natural environment, big business, Strong and Schmidheiny insist, will prove the earth’s salvation. And despite the fact that two of the only hedges against corporate rapaciousness have been national borders and government regulation, they claim it is precisely the elimination of these battered bulwarks that will lead to the garden of Eden. Skepticism, it seems clear, is warranted.

A classic rags-to-riches story (he left his home in Manitoba at age 14 and rode the rails to British Columbia), Maurice Strong’s path to Rio began with a series of successful investments in Western Canada’s mines and oil fields. In 1954, he became vice-president and treasurer of Dome Petroleum Ltd. He quickly established his reputation as a financial wizard with a particular talent for making corporations grow. After a stint as chief executive officer of one of the country’s leading investment firms, Power Corporation of Canada, Strong accepted an invitation to run PetroCanada , then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s foray into nationalizing part of Canada’s oil industry.

Since then, Strong has aggressively mixed corporate activity with public service, at one time heading Canada’s federal foreign aid agency. He has held various positions at the United Nations, serving as chair of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and adviser to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, which produced the Brundtland Report.

At the same time, Strong presided over a variety of business ventures, including controversial efforts to mine the water in an aquifer at the base of the Colorado Rockies, and to build a resort hotel on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica. Mining the water locked in the rock beneath the high plains of Colorado could have made Strong and his fellow investors billions of dollars; Coloradans who opposed the scheme on environmental grounds accused Strong of attempting to profit at the expense of the delicate hydrological balance of the region. "In our valley," said activist Greg Gosak, "he’s been up to no good." When called to testify before the Water Court in Denver, Strong invoked diplomatic immunity to avoid answering questions. He has since distanced himself from the project.

In Costa Rica, Strong built a luxury "ecotourism" hotel on land that later became part of an officially designated Indian Reserve. Although Strong has claimed that indigenous people have no interest in the area, indigenous leaders have declared otherwise. The case may end up in court.

Once co-director of Canada’s largest waste-handling company and chair of the Canada Development Investment Corporation, Strong has been accused several times of shady financial dealings, including illegally profiting from his relationship with PetroCanada and taking advantage of an insider trading scheme that netted him several million dollars. None of the accusations have stuck.

The other merchant at the helm of UNCED is Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny. One of the world’s wealthiest men, Schmidheiny presides over a personal fortune estimated at more than $3 billion. He sits on the board of the Union Bank of Switzerland (his brother Thomas and cousin Jakob hold seats on the boards of Switzerland’s two other major banks), and on the boards of Switzerland’s two largest corporations, Nestle and Asea Brown Boveri . His holdings include major investments in nuclear power, chemical manufacturing, electronics and mining.

Chile’s leading steel concern, in which Schmidheiny has a 30 percent stake, was paralyzed by the longest labor-management dispute of post-dictatorship Chile, which ended only with the defeat of union demands last December. When workers at his Everite factory in South Africa went on strike, demonstrators burned an effigy of Schmidheiny in the center of Zurich’s financial district.

Despite this background, Schmidheiny is considered a "softy" when compared to the average Swiss industrialist. When Schmidheiny announced the transfer of 600 jobs from his scientific instruments concern in Switzerland to Singapore, the Swiss press reacted with uncharacteristic calm. Said one Swiss journalist, "Tough measures tend to be accepted when the man announcing them is Schmidheiny."

Schmidheiny and Strong are long-time friends. Strong’s personal wealth includes holdings based in Switzerland, and both are members of the super-exclusive World Economic Forum, an organization of political leaders, leading scientists and CEOs of the world’s largest corporations, which meets each February at a discreet Swiss hideaway in Davos.

Two years ago, Strong recruited Schmidheiny to marshal "the perspective of business" for inclusion in the UNCED debate. Schmidheiny delivered. Gathering together the leaders of 48 major multinationals, including such world-class environmental criminals as Du Pont , Ciba-Geigy , Mitsubishi , Con- Agra and Rhone-Poulenc , Schmidheiny formed the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD). The BCSD claims no official status. "I don’t have a UN mandate," says Schmidheiny. "We are not even a legal entity." However, the organization’s influence at UNCED was formidable. The four dozen corporations also wield considerable financial clout, representing some four percent of world trade.

BCSD’s most visible effort has been the publication of Changing Course, a book that outlines the environmental rationale for permitting multinational corporations to ignore national borders, accountability and all forms of regulation. Ostensibly authored by Schmidheiny himself, the book is actually a collaborative effort, representing the consensus of a group that presumably represents the most enlightened portion of multinationals.

The book traverses the glaring inconsistencies of its thesis with apparently little discomfort, blithely making the case that secrecy and minimal regulation (or "self- regulation," as the industrialists prefer to call it), will save more trees than the patchwork of regulations that exist today. In tandem with promoting a free rein for industry, Changing Course gamely attempts to argue that only further economic growth can reverse the adverse impacts that the unhindered growth of the last four decades has had on the environment.

Strong and Schmidheiny are not criminals by the standards of global commerce. Indeed, in comparison to many of their colleagues, they are paragons of virtue. But they are voluntary captives of the world from which they have emerged, representing to perfection the new notion of "commerce with a human face." No amount of window dressing, however, can reconcile the fundamental disparity between the business paradigm of growth and exploitation and the preservation of the environment. It is important that, when sorting through the blinding green rhetoric that came out of the Earth Summit, citizens draw careful distinctions between the environment’s true allies and those that merely declare themselves so.

- Andre Carrothers/NGONet

Andre Carrothers is editor of Greenpeace Magazine in the United States.

Interview
A view from the South
An Interview with Chee Yoke Ling

Chee Yoke Ling is honorary secretary of Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth, Malaysia). A lawyer by training, she has focused on national environmental issues since 1981. Chee also works with the Penang, Malaysia -based Third World Network on international issues relating to the environment, development and international institutions.

Multinational Monitor: What would you say is at stake at UNCED?

Chee Yoke Ling: What is at stake here are the hopes that many of us working on environmental, developmental and health issues have had for many years.

We have always wanted to see much more regulation and control over corporations, especially corporations operating across boundaries, which have had little or no accountability for their activities to the public or even to their shareholders. We want to see a movement towards international law which would regulate TNCs [transnational corporations], building on the code of conduct that has been negotiated in the UN for the last 15 or 20 years.

The question is whether we are going to lose the opportunity to fully acknowledge the fundamental nature of the global environmental and development crisis, to find out who the players are, and to bring those players under control.

MM: What is the real UNCED agenda?

Chee: What is becoming very clear is that the interests of governments in the North are really at the heart of the agenda. There has been enough non-governmental organization lobbying and work done around the Earth Summit to bring to the agenda issues like debt inequities, international economic relations and institutions like the World Bank , the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which are reinforcing unsustainable production and consumption, but UNCED is not actually dealing with these issues. The agenda is one of barest minimum consensus.

The industrial countries do not want to change fundamentally, they do not want to control runaway economic exploitation, they do not want to control the players and TNCs who are at the heart of it. The North is saying, "Slow down your growth; we won’t, but we want you to."

A lot of the agenda says that any changes that should be taken to accommodate global environmental needs have to be done by the developing countries: "Have fewer people, don’t cut your forests, use less resources, slow down your growth." But if we don’t have economic growth, we can’t deal with poverty, so it’s a very vicious cycle. Northern countries cannot tell developing countries to solve the environment problem, but not deal with the pressures that are on developing countries - whether it is debt or an export market that we are tied to - to keep exploiting resources. It is asking for the impossible.

In the end, however, the environment is not really on the agenda of either North or South. The goal of both North and South is to keep growing.

MM: One of the big areas of discussion here is how much aid is going to go from North to South. Is that really a question that people should be looking at?

Chee: I think what [the North] does with aid is misleading. One of the things that has come out in the Earth Summit discussions to some extent is that there is such a massive flow of resources from the South to the North now, in terms of the financial flow, debt repayments, royalty payments, etc. Something like $200 billion a year is going from South to North, and about $50 billion is coming back in so-called aid.

If we look at the flow, then we have to rethink and reformulate our perceptions. Our image is that the North is rich and the South is poor. But if we look at the reality, the South is where all the resources are, the South is where more and more production is going on. And the products are going to Northern enterprises; in that sense, much of the wealth of the North is the result of the exploitation of the resources of the South.

The question is, first of all, how to share more equally, how to really deal with the more fundamental questions of trade relations and equity. You will have a better trading system if you deal with the debt issue. If you relieve the debt pressure, then the pressure on developing countries to exploit their resources will be reduced, and they will be able to develop their resources for their own benefit. Then they won’t need that much aid.

Secondly, much of the so-called aid never actually goes to the countries in the South or to the people who need it. A lot of the aid is not free; it is not grants, but loans. And a lot of the aid is actually recycled back to the North through projects, technology, materials and equipment. Much of the money that is coming in is tied to projects which siphon the money out to the North. It is not aid to the South, it is a subsidy to the people who are going to implement those projects. If we ask for more aid, at this point specifically, we’re not going to solve the problem, because the more money we are asking for, the more will be recycled back to the North. And if new money goes with the usual kind of development project, then, in the name of the environment, this new agreement will actually be used for more exploitation.

Of course, that’s not to say we don’t need money. I think there are areas where money is needed, for reorganization and pollution control, for example, but you can’t just have a little money for that, when at the same time more money is going towards exploiting resources. So we must look at how the rest of the money for development is being used, and how investments are being used. Otherwise, we are trying to reform while the fundamental development policy continues to be anti-people and anti-nature.

MM: One of the specific proposed conduits for transferring new aid is the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). What’s your critique of that entity?

Chee: Given the fact that some money is needed, who controls the money and making sure that it goes to good projects become important issues. The UNCED process and the two conventions are going to generate billions of dollars, and there has been a lot of discussion on where the money should go.

Some two and a half years ago, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program and United Nations Environment Program formed the Global Environmental Facility. It was actually the initiative of the French and German governments, which decided to create a global fund as a result of public pressure to put money into the environment. These two countries wanted the fund to be managed by not just the World Bank but by some aspect of the UN system.

This tripartite system appears to be something that’s new and innovative, but our study of the structure of the GEF shows that essentially it’s the World Bank which controls the money and approves the projects. Given that fact, whatever money comes into the GEF will then go to an institution which has a bad record on the environment and a bad record on social issues, and which has created a lot of poverty in the Third World. We don’t believe the World Bank is the solution to change things, and the GEF, because it is controlled by the World Bank, is going to perpetuate the problem.

The United States and some other countries are pushing very hard for the GEF to be the only mechanism for whatever money comes out of UNCED. We believe that that will actually put money into a very destructive institution and will mean more problems for those of us in the countries where the money’s going to come to.

MM: Another contentious issue here has been the biodiversity treaty, with most attention being focused on whether the United States is going to sign it. What is your assessment of the treaty itself, as well as the U.S. attitude towards it?

Chee: Everyone is very angry [at the United States for not signing], believing that the treaty protects biodiversity. But if you look at the biodiversity treaty and its provisions, it is essentially about: access to biodiversity; who will own the germplasm that is collected from countries in the South where most of biodiversity lies; who owns the biotechnology; and who is going to be able to have the monopoly over the profits made from selling the biotechnology products derived from the biodiversity. The ordinary person in the world looks at the Biodiversity Convention as a conservation treaty, but the fight is really over access, patents and profits.

Biodiversity has tremendous economic value if you link it with biotechnology. The Bush administration had announced that something like $4 billion a year comes from the biotechnology industry, and they want to see it increase to $50 billion a year. This is one area where the United States is still in the lead.

A critical point we have to understand is that there are a lot of institutions under the World Bank umbrella, like the International Rice Research Institute, that have been collecting seeds, especially agricultural crops, for decades. And the biggest issue all along was: who owns those seeds? Farmers from many countries donate seeds, and these gene banks are holding them as trustees for the world community, for the security of the future. Who owns the seeds in those gene banks has always been a big issue. The biodiversity treaty right now does not deal with the ownership of all those gene banks. It deals with ownership of biodiversity when the convention comes into force. Ownership of biodiversity then comes to belong to national governments where the biodiversity rests. It has not dealt with the existing gene banks. That is why in the last few weeks there have been a lot of moves to start patenting by the international institutions where the seed banks are kept and by the U.S. national seed banks, which also have a lot of biodiversity collections from the South. Because the Biodiversity Convention has failed to deal with who owns those seeds, the South has sacrificed all the seeds currently in the gene banks.

MM: Why has Bush refused to sign the treaty if it confers advantages on U.S. biotech companies?

Chee: The United States is very clever, we feel. There are provisions in the treaty about biosafety, which the developing countries see as winning points, about controlling biotechnology research and release of genetically modified organisms, there are provisions that say that new technology must be made available at preferential and concessional terms, and not just the market rate. Bush is saying "I’m not going to sign it because of these things," and the whole world is attacking him. Countries are rushing to sign it, just to say to the United States, "You are a bad guy but we are good guys." But half the treaty is actually very good for TNCs because it allows ownership to be asserted by those who hold the gene banks, thus ensuring access by TNCs and subsequent patenting of the products.

Many of us are beginning to think it could be a ploy on the part of the United States to concede in the negotiations on certain key things like access to technology and biosafety, which it does not really like, and then won’t sign. Even without the United States signing, this treaty will come into existence, because it only needs 30 signatures. So the United States is the bad guy, but the TNCs that wanted ownership over the materials in the gene banks once and for all have gotten their way. And we think the United States will probably sign later, to show that it has given in to public pressure, and everyone will be very happy. It’s then open to the United States to negotiate changes in the treaty.

Countries will be eager to have the United States join, because they think they will then be able to get access to U.S. biotechnology. So the United States will come in and sign, but on condition that the provisions like biosafety and access to technology be weakened. I think that may be the scenario.

MM: What is your opinion of the discussion on population control at the Earth Summit?

Chee: I think one of the positive aspects of UNCED is that we have managed to create more fundamental debate on population control. The attempt at the beginning of UNCED was to promote the idea that reducing population - and population means essentially the population of the South - is the key issue of environmental preservation. We have been able to debate this issue and to identify that wasteful and unnecessary consumption is a major if not the major cause of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

When you talk about population control, people are always saying, "Oh, all these people are going to eat up all the resources." It’s a very selfish and very racist underlying reaction. If one person in the North consumes eight times more than a person in the South, you should have fewer people in the North! For each person you cut down in the North, you’re going to cut down consumption by eight times.

There are people who say if you are against policies that cut down on the number of people, then you are against family planning. That is not true. Population control and family planning are not equivalent concepts.

There are many studies to show that where people are poor, there’s so much insecurity that having more children makes economic sense. If you have high mortality rates, then you must have more children to make sure you have children who will be able to grow up. Even in the South, once there are better social amenities, and people are economically more secure, almost automatically the number of children is reduced. So family planning is something that every relatively secure family or couple begins to exercise as a natural course anyway.

Where you have a lot of people, it’s usually because there is poverty, and poverty is created not by these poor people being useless and helpless, but because they have been deprived of resources, which have been taken away for a few other people.

Additionally there are a lot of groups working on how population control policies funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development or the World Bank or other agencies have caused a lot of human rights violations. When we say that population control is very dangerous, that it is a myth that population is the major cause of environmental degradation, and furthermore that population control is a violation of human rights, a lot of people get very angry. But we are against forced contraception, forced sterilization and the dumping of hazardous contraceptive products in the name of population control.

I think UNCED has created a lot of debate around this issue. I think the women’s group has run a series of very significant debates around this issue. And I think we need to build more understanding.

MM: Will the perspectives that Third World and women’s groups have voiced here on the population issue influence the 1994 UN Population Summit?

Chee: I think the Population Summit is designed to aggressively push for national population control policies. UNCED has been quite good in the sense that it has started a debate, and I think it has actually sent a message to a lot of people who at the beginning were very pro-cut down the numbers, and who are now talking very differently. So we have started a process of a wider and better understanding of the population issue, and we need to build this up. At the Population Summit there will be so much publicity about numbers again, and there will be all these pictures of starving Africans. But if you look at population all over the world, Africa isn’t overpopulated, Europe and Japan are, in terms of human per hectare density, and certainly in terms of consumption of resources per capita.

Consumption is really the key issue. Countries in the North, especially the United States, are saying that consumption is a personal matter, it’s a matter of personal choice and [individual] rights, and that the state cannot intervene with consumption. And yet they tell us that population control is something that the state should enforce! So, where’s the human rights and respect for the people of the South? Consumption is a personal right, but how many children you want, what you want to do to your body, is international policy and World Bank policy. That itself is a basic contradiction.

MM: Does focusing on consumption take attention away from the way things are produced, and on who is making the production choices?

Chee: We can’t be simplistic about it, and we have to go into more detail to [address] the way goods are produced. There can be less wastefulness, less pollution, by fixing the production technology.

When we talk about how consumption must be reduced, it is because consumption is a direct pressure on resources and the creation of waste. Not just at the production level, but at the consumption level, the garbage that we throw out. People have to actually consume a lot less as a general principle. Green technology and environmentally friendly products may be good in one sense, but it does not change the fact that you are still going to use more and more resources, and that is unsustainable. Many of the things we consume we don’t need. We can have a simpler lifestyle and it doesn’t mean we are less fulfilled or happy, we all know that.

For industry, people’s consumption must increase in order to increase production and profits, and in doing that resources will always be drained. The advertising industry is a key component in making people consume more and more. The whole process of fashion is really one of the major keys to increasing consumption. Something is fashionable now, but in six months you must wear something else. And when the same lifestyle and culture is promoted through television around the world, then everybody, including the poorest person in any part of the world, wants to live that lifestyle which is unsustainable. How we look at media and advertising is very important, because of the values promoted there.

When we say we have to adjust, we’re not asking everybody across the board in the North to give up equally. We need to have social equity and redistribution of wealth within each country. The elite and the big middle class of the North as well as the elite of the South must give up more. That doesn’t mean that poor people who are in the North should be giving up [resources]. They also don’t have enough. So I think we need to work out a plan of action for people in the North who are poor and who have a right to more for even their basic needs. But at the same time, there is a whole group of people who are overusing, overconsuming and have more wealth then they’ll ever need. In pure environmental terms, we cannot afford to have that kind of wealth generated and accumulated, because it is at the expense of the environment and other people.

MM: You are pessimistic about the likely outcome of this conference. How could it turn out negatively given the great scrutiny and involvement of so many non- governmental organizations?

Chee: This is a big gathering of NGOs, but I don’t think everyone here working on issues at the local and national level have been able to monitor developments at the international level. The battle fought out among governments and the powerful role played by TNCs throughout the negotiations leading up to the conference are not fully known to most NGOs.

For instance, the corporations have been consistently lobbying at every UNCED negotiation. And because their interests are at stake, they organized very well. They also have served on advisory boards, they even serve on governmental delegations as technical experts. So in a sense the scrutiny is not a scrutiny of equal strength on both sides.

Public control over the process has been very weak. And that is very easy to understand; how many NGOs are there that were able to attend every negotiation session over the past two years and have full access to information? The whole thing is not designed for popular scrutiny. It’s designed to really be kept within a very small circle, and then it’s going to be put into place as international law. Most of the governments negotiating don’t even know what’s happening, they don’t understand the issues.

Of course, we cannot deny that there have been some benefits from UNCED. It brought together for the first time in one forum, citizens and NGOs from diverse backgrounds and struggles. Many countries actually had national discussions on environmental and development issues. It brought together governments to talk about these issues. Negotiating has been a very interesting learning process for even the diplomats involved, because they’ve been made to address those issues. Not perfectly, not the way we would like to have seen it, but at least it is a beginning.

Other issues were not dealt with, and should be dealt with. But in a way I think we couldn’t have expected any more. Everybody wants to see their interests protected. We want to see environmental interests and social interests more protected. The TNCs want to see their interests more protected. And in this whole battle, given the unequal strength of the different interests, we have obviously lost the struggle in the immediate sense, in the short term, especially in the contents of the biodiversity and climate change treaties. But, for the long term, I think we have become very much more exposed to the international aspects of our work.

MM: What will be the role of NGOs in the aftermath of UNCED?

Chee: Because Agenda 21 is not law, it’s not legally binding. Which means that even though it may be accepted, that is not the end of the story. Once treaties are signed, they do become international law. But international law has to be implemented, it doesn’t come to pass by itself. Even if the Biodiversity Convention gets signed, in the end how do you enforce biodiversity protection? In the end we will still have to monitor it.

I think that if nothing else, the NGOs here can be alerted to the dangers of some of the things coming out of UNCED. If we can be alerted to some of the positive aspects in the Biodiversity Convention like biosafety, then we must work to not allow the good aspects to be watered down. At the same time, we have to expose the weak aspects to exert pressure so that we can at least control the process to some extent. Because it doesn’t end in Rio.

The Earth Summit has created some new obstacles and opened up some new doors. NGOs and movements must access what is actually coming out of UNCED. Then we can identify the areas we need to concentrate on.

I think one clear area is public education on TNCs. We must continue to lobby for national legislation, and we shouldn’t give up hope that the code of conduct on TNCs that’s been shelved can be adopted and enforced. It has been left out deliberately and schematically and we should keep pushing for it, because governments are getting further and further away from corporate accountability.

Let’s have consumer boycotts and consumer actions, because these companies do have to rely on people to buy their products. I think we have to go back to action in a concrete way. We also need to demand that our governments not give up too easily. There are many more things we can do. We are best at national movements.

But the thing is how to connect internationally our national struggles and national campaigns. If we don’t see the connection, then we feel helpless. We can say TNCs are getting very strong, but what are TNCs? TNCs like Mitsubishi , Ciba- Geigy , Du Pont , Shell are affecting our lives in a daily manner. We need to look at the global aspect to understand how the local campaigns have to be much more focused. It’s not going to be easy. But we have no choice.

Interview
A Warning from Bermuda
An Interview with Stuart Hayward

Stuart Jackson Hayward has been a member of parliament in Bermuda since 1989. The first independent elected since the advent of party politics in Bermuda, he represents a platform of social and environmental activism, stressing the importance of ecological health as the basis of the island’s economy. Hayward co-authored Bermuda’s Delicate Balance, published in 1981. While the Bermuda Government declined an invitation to send an official representative to the Earth Summit in Rio, Hayward sought private funding to attend on behalf of his country.

Multinational Monitor: What are the central elements of Bermuda’s economic model?

Stuart Hayward: Bermuda is mainly a tourist economy, and also has a sector that deals with international finance, where international companies set up an office for the transfer of money or for doing reinsurance business. The economic model is the one that exists in most Western nations: anything that results in profit without being illegal is okay. It’s a model based on continuous growth.

What has happened in Bermuda is that the pace of growth has outstripped the ability of our social and our physical environment to accommodate it. We had such rapid development in the 1970s that people had more money than they knew what to do with. A lot of money went to the purchase of consumer electronics, and great quantities of surplus funds went to construction and development. In the 1970s and 1980s, the construction industry grew to such a degree that we had to import people to staff it. Any slight downturn in the economy resulted in a lot of unemployment in the construction industry.

In Bermuda, we have 20 square miles and 60,000 people. That’s 3,000 people per square mile, as compared to 60 per square mile for the United States and six per square mile for Canada. We have a more dense population than any other oceanic island and most countries. Even countries that are considered to be densely populated, like the Netherlands, Bangladesh or Japan, are all far below that figure of 3,000 per square mile. Yet our local fertility is not enough to provide a sufficient workforce for the economy to grow, so we have to import people to work. So here are two things which are working against each other. The population is already so high as to cause environmental problems, but for the economy to continue to grow, we have to import additional people.

We import most of our food. One area that has been clearly documented is the importation of fish. We import three quarters of our fish consumption. But, in 1991, we were forced to shut down the biggest portion of our fishing industry, the trap fishing industry, because the fish stocks were being decimated beyond their ability to recover. That means that we over-extracted from our fish supply for just one quarter of our fish consumption. Looking at it another way, if we were to rely solely on local fish for our fish consumption, then we would be only able to supply a population of less than a quarter of what we do now.

Perhaps the most significant way of looking at it is to extend our economic model to another country. From where would a country like Japan import three quarters of its fish consumption? Or from where would a country like the United States import three quarters of its fish consumption? Let’s assume that the emerging nations of Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America buy into and proceed with Bermuda’s development model. They will find that it’s just not possible. There is not a place from which the entire world can buy fish. They don’t sell fish on Mars. There is no place from which the entire world can import additional labor; there are no humans on Mars. There is no place from which the entire world can import its produce or meat.

Bermuda is an ideal test tube, if you will, for what is going to happen, for what we can anticipate with economies around the globe, if they adopt the current model that’s touted in the Western world.

MM: What has fueled the high rates of growth in Bermuda?

Hayward: Two things. One is that is in 1968 we moved to the Westminster system of government. The party system was imported wholesale, and the people who ran the country before formed the largest party, so they continue to run the government. Their claim to fame is that they have provided more economic satisfaction for a greater portion of the population. They see their legitimacy as tied to the economic growth model. So they have promoted and fostered it. Because they in essence represent the merchant class, it has tied in with that group’s objectives.

The other element has been the rapid [growth] of tourism and international business, which were allowed to grow without sufficient controls. After World War II, the U.S. economy expanded. Americans’ disposable incomes expanded, and so they started to spend it on travel. The rapid growth of tourism from the United States provided more money for Bermuda. Also transnational corporations and U.S. companies that wanted to do things like reinsurance and global money management found Bermuda an attractive place from which to operate. We didn’t take fly-by-night companies or ones that didn’t meet certain criteria, but still the growth was not controlled. For many people the situation was ideal, because money just kept coming in.

Partially growth resulted from the avariciousness of our people; as more money came in, the more we wanted. And this perhaps is the really serious problem with growth- oriented economies. Say you were starting a new business, or a new country, and you wanted to have a growth curve. What would that curve look like? What would its shape be, and what would its end point be? We deal with growth as if it has no end point, as if it just goes up forever. So you have a growth in population, a growth in appetites, and the curve takes a direction that is absolutely unsustainable.

MM: What are some of the resulting social problems that you have seen in Bermuda?

Hayward: Bermuda had a history of being cordial. We were an extremely hospitable people, and that was basically because we were content. Now, with people having got on this fast track of wanting growth, we don’t have time to be cordial anymore. Always looking for more here, for more there, and trying to keep somebody else from getting more from you has resulted in accumulated stress that has left people just more cranky. We’re a lot more volatile, a lot less sociable.

If the United States sneezes, we catch a cold, because most of our tourists come through the United States. When the U.S. economy goes into recession, ours does automatically. So we are having a dip in the economic growth, and when you have large numbers of people who have bought into the growth economy, and suddenly they find that they can’t grow anymore - whether they are business people who are looking for growth in their profits, or whether it’s the working class people who are looking for growth in their wages - they become suspicious of each other, no longer capable of cooperation. The whole psyche becomes dog-eat-dog, the whole social ambiance of the place changes.

MM: How does the growth model impact on the population economically, in terms of income and lifestyle?

Hayward: As people become more affluent, everyone wants to get on the economic growth bandwagon, so prices go up more than they need to. As prices go up, people who have not yet got onto the economic bandwagon find themselves moving backward economically. The people who are the poorest in the economy - we don’t have abject poverty but we have relative poverty - find that the ratio of their income to their output decreases, so they become poorer. And that has consequences for the quality of food that they can buy, it has implications for the quality of medical protection they are able to buy, it affects what transportation they are able to buy - it has an impact on their quality of life.

Let’s talk about traffic. We’re on a small island and we really cannot build much more roadway. But the number of cars continues to grow, because there are more people and that is one thing they can spend their money on. There are many young people who see getting a car as a rite of passage.

But our roads are relatively narrow and, as traffic increases, any small turbulence has a big impact. In the past, people would travel at 20 miles per hour, and if someone wanted to come out of the driveway, they would stop and let them in. If they stop now, there is someone right on the bumper who starts blowing the horn, there’s confusion for the person who is driving and wants to stop, there is confusion for the person who wants to get out into traffic, and it increases the stress level.

People drive faster because the snarls in traffic are more difficult, so in order to get from one place to another on time they have to either leave home earlier or drive faster. Driving faster exacerbates the problem and on it goes. Each one of these problems feeds into the other.

We are at the leading edge of development. Bermuda is held up as a model to the world, at an income of $27,000 dollars per year per capita. That’s extraordinary. Outside of the oil producing countries, it’s one of the highest [per capita incomes] in the world. If environmental and social problems are the end result of our economic model, we must stop and ask, is it a viable model for the "developing" countries?

MM: What specific environmental problems is Bermuda facing?

Hayward: Bermuda is 75 percent developed; that is, 75 percent of its land cannot be considered available for development, as it already has a use allocated to it. This is an enormous quantity of land being used. The land bank is diminishing.

We produce more waste per capita than any country in the world, and we consume more energy per capita than any country in the world. If you take the gases that are created by incineration, electricity production or refrigeration, in all of these cases, Bermuda is at the top of the list per capita. Bermuda is the greatest per capita contributor to the global warming phenomenon.

But in Bermuda, if the global warming effect does occur, we’re going to lose a sizable chunk of our real estate. The first thing that’s going to go is our beaches. If the ocean levels rise one or two meters, we can kiss most of our beaches goodbye. We are already spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in trying to fix one beach that has begun to erode unnaturally. We had some severe hurricanes, which may be part of the global warming phenomenon. In all the hurricanes we’ve had in the past, this degree of erosion has never occurred. So it is a new phenomenon, and it’s not part of any [natural] cycle, not as far as the records we’ve kept in Bermuda can tell. So we’re looking at something happening in the natural elements that is impacting on Bermuda’s coastal configuration and on the economy in two ways. One, the amount of money that will have to be [siphoned] off for repairs, and two, the reduced revenues we will get if we don’t have the kind of beaches we used to have.

MM: What sort of alternative direction should be taken to alleviate the problems you’re describing?

Hayward: Of course, whenever someone says a redistribution of the existing pie, then we’ve always heard, "Oh, you’re talking about communism or socialism." And they hold up the failure of the Soviet Union as the ultimate proof that that economic model cannot work. But there are many possibilities between the current economic model and what was called communism or socialism in Eastern Europe. I’m not an economist. But it is clear to me that every place cannot live as Bermuda does, importing all of its food.

We need to begin to appreciate that the purpose of money is not to be a commodity but to be a tool used for the exchange of services and goods. We need to exercise the extremes of human will to get off of this concept that the only way to fulfillment is through the accumulation of vast amounts of riches.

Here again, Bermuda is a good example. You would think that, in a country that has an average annual income of $27,000 per person, the people would be ecstatic. Because this is what is held up for economic development, as how to solve the problems of the world. Well, judging from our experience, it’s just not so. The people in Bermuda are less happy then they were, and this assertion is not just based on personal observation; scientifically designed surveys indicate that the level of satisfaction, the perceived quality of life in Bermuda, is lower than it was four, six, eight, ten years ago. This is a good example that wealth by itself does not bring satisfaction.

As individuals, as families, as organizations, as communities, we have to go back to the drawing board to redefine what it is that we want out of life.

Feature
Citizen Summit
by Robert Weissman

RIO DE JANEIRO - The thousands of government officials and journalists who swarmed into Rio for the Earth Summit were outnumbered by an even larger number of non-governmental environmental and developmental activists who converged on the city, hoping to witness and influence the official meeting or to participate in a parallel non- governmental conference called the Global Forum.

Many of the non-governmental activists, especially from larger environmental groups in the industrialized countries, sought to play an active role in the official meeting. Thousands procured credentials for the official United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Although they were not permitted to participate as actively in the negotiations as they were at the four preparatory negotiating conferences held before the official summit, non-governmental activists sat in on negotiating sessions in an attempt to prevent deals from being cut "behind closed doors." They lobbied government officials and sought to provide the news-starved media with comments on every turn of the negotiations. A few activists were invited by their governments to be members of their country’s official delegation.

Most of the non-governmental activists, however, did not make the daily 30-mile trek from downtown Rio to Rio Centro, the convention center at which the Earth Summit was held. Instead, they attended the Global Forum, a non-governmental parallel conference.

Political carnival

The purpose of the Global Forum, according to its two co-chairs, Tony Smith and Warren Linder, was to create "political space" for non-governmental activists and interested parties to exchange ideas and express their views.

Central to the effort to create political space was the creation of a physical space for tens of thousands of people to come together. The Global Forum organizers situated the event in Flamengo Park, near downtown Rio. Nearly 700 booths lined the perimeter of the Global Forum grounds, and 39 large tents - which became sweltering during the abnormally hot Rio days - served as meeting rooms. The physical contrast to the imposing, modern Rio Centro was stark.

Any organization which wanted to use that space - from Greenpeace to a Canadian logging industry association to the International Inspiration University of Leonard Orr - was free to do so. The Global Forum organizers did not impose a central theme, or even an agenda, on the event. Individual groups or coalitions of groups scheduled their own meetings and debates.

To a large extent, the Global Forum had the air of a political carnival. Participants could visit booths selling batiks from Africa or promoting revolutionary communism or the Baha’i religion as the key to environmental sustainability; attend debates on the effects of free trade or presentations on New Age computer networks, and go to evening dance and music performances or prayer sessions held by a dozen different religious groups. This breadth of activity infused the Forum with a free-wheeling atmosphere, but also a sense of directionlessness and chaos.

Part of the disorganized feeling was probably somewhat inevitable given the huge numbers of people involved; 15,000 non-governmental activists registered to participate in the Global Forum, and an estimated 15,000 local Brazilians visited each day.

A temporary monetary shortfall, leading to a half-day vendor cut off of audio, translation and other electronically provided services, as well as completely unsubstantiated - and angrily denied - charges in the Brazilian press that one of the organizers of the event had embezzled money, added to the chaotic feeling.

So did the disparate political messages voiced at the Global Forum. The event’s organizers did not screen participants in the Global Forum, so organizations like the International Chlorine Generators and the World Bank - which are non-governmental, but not citizens’ groups - were free to set up booths and actively participate in the event. For some activists, these entities’ presence at an event allegedly promoting ecological sustainability was intolerable. Friends of the Earth International posted signs warning "toxic information" on several booths, including that of the Brazilian mining company Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD). A group of youth from dozens of countries took even more militant action, tearing down posters and other material from the World Bank booth and burning them.

Progressive protocols

The majority of the most focused work at the Global Forum took place under the auspices of the Forum of International Non-Governmental Organizations and Social Movements (FINGO), a grouping which emerged out of NGOs’ efforts to influence UNCED negotiations in the period leading up to the Earth Summit.

The focus of much of their activity in Rio was negotiating a set of alternative environmental and development treaties and an Earth Charter alternative to UNCED’s Rio Declaration.

At international meetings, supplemented by telephone and fax communications, non-governmental activists produced more than two dozen draft treaties. Some of the treaties addressed issues covered by UNCED, such as biodiversity and global warming. Others dealt with topics UNCED neglected - multinational corporations, trade, nuclear power, the international waste trade. The early drafts of the treaties were discussed, debated, refined and finalized in the tents of the Global Forum.

The final product, said one of the FINGO coordinators, constituted "an alternative development model" - an alternative to both the dominant existing model and the reformed, more environmentally concerned one implicit in Agenda 21, the Earth Summit’s agenda for the next century, and other UNCED documents. Many of the treaties, which were not negotiated in a coordinated fashion, insist on the importance of reducing Northern consumption of goods and directing resources to the world’s poor in order to ensure that they have access to food and clean water, and can live healthy lives with adequate shelter and clothing.

An overarching document, the People’s Earth Declaration, rejects the current prevailing development model and global allocation of resources. "The path of deepening international debt, structural adjustment, market deregulation, free trade and the monopolization of intellectual property rights that currently dominates policy thought and action is a path to collective self-destruction, not to sustainable development."

A new set of principles should guide economic activity, the Declaration says: "The fundamental purpose of economic organization is to meet the community’s basic needs, such as for food, shelter, clothing, education, health and the enjoyment of culture." Toward this end, the world must pursue new economic policies: "Organizing economic life around decentralized relatively self-reliant local economies that control and manage their own productive resources, provide all people an equitable share in the control and benefits of productive resources and have the right to safeguard their own environmental and social standards is essential to sustainability."

The Declaration also stresses the important role of women and indigenous people in achieving ecological sustainability, and the necessity of all public institutions, including international ones, operating in an open and democratic fashion.

Within this general sort of framework, the separate treaties were hashed out. According to Liszt Viera, a FINGO co-chair, the treaties not only critique existing economic and social institutions, relations and patterns, but will also serve as the basis for new international networks and campaigns.

The networks, formal and informal, established at the Global Forum will undoubtedly be the event’s most enduring and important legacy. Even harsh non- governmental critics of the Global Forum, who questioned the usefulness of an eco-fair as well as the negotiation of treaties by NGOs which are not accountable to any constituency and which cannot follow through on agreements, for example, to curb carbon dioxide emissions, conceded the value of the newly created networks. Northern groups will certainly help their Southern colleagues, by sharing information and providing financial assistance. The Southern NGOs are likely to provide as much assistance to their Northern partners, teaching them that environmental questions cannot be separated from issues of social justice, both within nations and internationally.

Feature
The Women’s Agenda

by Robert Weissman

RIO DE JANEIRO - "Women have the power to make change, to transform the earth," said Susanna George of the Asian and Pacific Development Centre in Malaysia.

"The women’s agenda should be the global agenda because we recognize what all of the issues are with a sort of truthfulness that a lot of people aren’t allowed because they are caught up in systems" of power, she added.

These were some of the central messages to emerge from the women’s tent, the site of Planeta Femea, a week and a half of meetings, debates and discussions among women at the Global Forum, the non-governmental conference held parallel to the official Earth Summit. Organized under the rubric of the Women’s International Policy Action Committee (IPAC), a women’s group made up of 54 women from 31 countries, the women’s tent housed discussions on environmental and developmental issues ranging from biotechnology to militarism to the Third World debt to population policy. The women’s events were the best organized and most geographically balanced and topically inclusive of all the events held at the Global Forum.

Global Forum participants stressed the importance of the networking that took place at the conference, in part because it was not clear what else they would accomplish in Rio. That networking, particularly between activists from Northern and Southern countries, was most evident in the women’s tent. Chief Bisi Ogounleye of Nigeria expressed her appreciation for the genuine communication that took place within the women’s tent, saying, "Before people talked for us [African women], but not to us. Nobody talks for anyone anymore."

Women’s critique

The Planeta Femea activists sharply criticized the documents approved by the official conference, basing their denunciations on the everyday experiences of women throughout the world. A "Declaration by Women at the Global Forum" claimed authority on the basis of the "millions of women who experience daily the violence of environmental degradation, poverty and exploitation of women’s work and bodies, ... our representation of more than 50 percent of the world’s population and our special responsibility for the nurturance and continuity of life."

From this perspective, the women found the documents emanating from the Earth Summit to be fundamentally flawed. "The Rio Declaration [the Earth Summit’s proclamation of environmental principles] has not given us the philosophical basis of change," said Rosina Wiltshire of the Women and Development Unit (WAND) in Barbados.

In emphasizing what they called sustainable development, Earth Summit negotiators refused to break with prevailing economic, social and environmental paradigms, the women charged. "The catchword of ‘sustainable development’ to us in the South is a contradiction. Development means a kind of violence that comes with it," said Corinne Kumar of India - a violence of communities displaced by major hydroelectric projects, of rural families losing their land to export-oriented plantations, of strip-mined forests once used as community resources, of local water supplies poisoned by pesticide runoff. Kumar asserts that a genuine focus on the concept of sustainability "begins to show the way for another ethic," one which emphasizes caring between people and the interconnectedness of ecosystems and communities.

The women also criticized the Earth Summit for failing to address a number of specific issues, such as militarism and nuclear weapons and power. The contrast is stark between the Earth Summit’s Agenda 21, UNCED’s agenda for the next century, and the Women’s Action Agenda 21, approved at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet, a November 1991 meeting held in Miami by IPAC and attended by 1,500 women from 83 countries.

Agenda 21 does not mention militarism, and the Rio Declaration states only that "Warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development. States shall therefore respect international law providing protection for the environment in times of armed conflict and cooperate in its further development, if necessary." In contrast, the Women’s Action Agenda 21 charges that "military expenditures, the international arms trade and armed conflict deprive billions of human beings of basic security and well-being" and condemns "the disastrous environmental impact of all military activity." The women’s agenda calls for a 50 percent reduction in military spending, the creation of civilian, gender-balanced commissions to scrutinize all military activities and decisive actions to ban the international traffic in weapons of mass destruction.

Where Agenda 21 ignores the issue of nuclear power and weapons, the Women’s Action Agenda 21 demands that "nuclear weapons be dismantled, that nuclear testing cease immediately and a global nuclear test ban treaty be negotiated, signed and enforced" and that the use of nuclear power be phased out.

The women consistently made efforts to connect broad policy statements to the specific experiences of groups of women. The call for a nuclear test ban, for example, was linked to the nightmarish experience of many women in the Marshall Islands; poisoned by radioactive fallout, they are giving birth to "jellyfish babies," born without limbs, eyes or brains.

This insistence on weaving women’s concrete experiences into structural analysis deepened and enriched the women’s diagnosis of problems and prescriptions for change.

For example, Zen Tedesse, an Ethiopian panelist at Planeta Femea, discussed desertification, Africa’s most pressing environmental crisis. Desertification, the transformation of lands near genuine deserts into desert-like conditions, takes its most severe toll on women, who perform 80 percent of rural labor in Africa. Desertification reduces crop yields and forces women to walk longer distances to collect increasingly scarce firewood and water. In an attempt to involve women in solving the crisis that affects them most severely, many foreign aid projects are recruiting women to participate in tree-planting schemes and other means of combating desertification.

Tedesse, however, pointed out that African women perform the vast majority of household labor and agricultural work, and are increasingly forced to take on additional tasks as debt-strapped governments cut back services in areas such as health care. Assigning women the additional responsibility of fighting desertification will increase their burden beyond already unmanageable levels, she argued. Accordingly, she said, efforts to address desertification cannot be piecemeal; "there must be a restructuring of political and social relations." The sexual division of labor must be reconstituted and the foreign debts of African countries must be forgiven or reduced, so that governments can again provide some of the social services they have cut back as well as pursue measures to address the desertification problem directly.

This sort of comprehensive analysis of developmental and environmental problems, based on people’s real-life experiences, was almost totally lacking from the official Earth Summit.

Women’s mark

Despite their harsh criticism of the Earth Summit, the Planeta Femea activists made a significant mark on it.

The Planeta Femea meetings in Rio were the culmination of women’s efforts to influence the outcome of the Earth Summit. They lobbied at the preparatory meetings held for the official conference, held the November 1991 Miami conference to set their own agenda and urged national governments to support women’s demands and to include women in their Earth Summit delegations.

According to Bella Abzug, the former New York congressperson who serves as co-chair of IPAC, the lobbying campaign paid off. The early drafts of the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 "hardly mentioned the word ‘woman,’" she said. The final documents "represent an enormous jump from [that] time."

One of the Rio Declaration’s 27 principles, for example, states, "Women have a vital role in environmental management and development. Their full participation is therefore essential to achieve sustainable development."

The most significant accomplishment of the women activists may be what Abzug called the "mainstreaming" of women’s concerns throughout the documents. Women are mentioned throughout Agenda 21 as having a critical role in protecting forests and biodiversity, and as the group most harmed by environmental degradation. Women succeeded at the Earth Summit, said Abzug, in creating a growing awareness that women "are the managers of development and the primary environmental caretakers."

Feature
Indigenous Protocols
by Robert Weissman

RIO DE JANEIRO - One of the most positive outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was the successful effort of indigenous peoples to make environmental activists and policymakers recognize that guarantees of indigenous rights must be a central component of efforts to solve the global environmental crisis.

Bored by a myriad of speeches, forums, panel discussions and press conferences, the thousands of journalists covering the official Earth Summit and the Global Forum, the non-governmental parallel conference, swarmed around the indigenous representatives in Rio. Photographers and camerapeople yearned for interesting visuals, and indigenous people dressed in their traditional garb fit the bill.

But the fundamental reason for the attention devoted to indigenous people was the level of organization they have achieved in the last several years and displayed at the Earth Summit.

The week before the Earth Summit, from May 25 to May 31, hundreds of indigenous representatives from all over the world met at Kari-Oca Village, outside of Rio, for a conference on territory, environment and development. Hundreds also participated in the International Indigenous Commission’s Indio ‘92 conference, held as part of the Global Forum, and in other events at the Global Forum.

Muffled voices

The organizational work that preceded the Kari-Oca and Indio ‘92 meetings led to the inclusion of a section on indigenous peoples’ rights in the Agenda 21 document negotiated at the official Earth Summit. "In view of the interrelationship between the natural environment and its sustainable development and the cultural, social, economic and physical well-being of indigenous people," Agenda 21 states, "national and international efforts to implement sound and sustainable development should recognize, accommodate, promote and strengthen the role of indigenous peoples and their communities." The document calls on national governments to grant greater legal protections to indigenous people, consult with them over resource management, provide guarantees for indigenous intellectual and cultural property and consider ratifying international conventions on indigenous peoples’ rights.

Despite this achievement, indigenous leaders expressed frustration and disgust with the official Earth Summit. "Indigenous people should be speaking at UNCED," said one representative from Canada. "Because we don’t have a voice there, to me it is not the United Nations."

Government negotiators "are not really talking about what should change," said Ariel Araujo of the Mocovi people in Argentina and coordinator of indigenous negotiations with the United Nations. "Indigenous people have tried during the whole UNCED process to get their voice heard," Araujo told Multinational Monitor, "but we weren’t really listened to." He explained that indigenous people wanted specific commitments from governments, especially with regard to demarcating indigenous lands, but that government representatives deleted text concerning demarcation from the drafts of the treaties during negotiations. As a result, he said, "The UNCED process does not mean anything to indigenous peoples; it won’t change anything."

"Our proposals were not accepted, so we have rejected the whole process," said Marcos Terena of the Brazilian Inter-Tribal Committee. "When the government treaties are signed, we’ll have nothing to do with them."

Indigenous speak out

But most indigenous people felt that they did make gains at Rio, through participation in the Kari-Oca meeting and events at the Global Forum.

For many participants, they provided an opportunity to learn of shared problems, experiences and beliefs among indigenous people throughout the world, and to publicize their concerns.

Many denounced the racism they experience and passionately proclaimed their humanity. One indigenous person from Brazil said, "For the white people, the Indians are savages. But we are people - we have a soul, a heart, feelings."

Many others described ongoing assaults on their communities from land invaders, large-scale development projects and resource-extracting multinational corporations. Kanhok of the Kayapó people in Brazil, for example, provided a wrenching account of environmental devastation and health crises brought on by invading gold prospectors. Mercury used to extract gold has polluted the Kayapó’s rivers so that their children can no longer drink the river water, he said. The mercury has also killed the rivers’ fish, forcing the Kayapó to travel a day from their village in order to procure food. The miners have also brought new diseases. "Our medicine in the forest cures our own diseases," Kanhok said poignantly, "but we have nothing against these diseases." He pleaded for medicine from outside communities.

Some came seeking specific expressions of support. Representatives of the Chamoru Nation in Guam, involved in a land trust case with the U.S. government, asked the Indio ‘92 meeting to approve a resolution supporting their claims. The resolution, which the Indio ‘92 participants approved unanimously, accused the United States of violating treaty obligations to the Chamorus, encouraging migration into Guam, building up military installations and nuclear stockpiles on the island and refusing to return Chamoru land even after the U.S. government designated it as excess federal property. Subsequent to the passage of the resolution, according to Rieann Limtiaco of the Chamoru Nation Tribal Council, the Chamorus won a favorable ruling in their land trust case. Limtiaco attributed the victory in part to the international attention garnered at the Indio ‘92 conference. This "proves what happens when indigenous people unite," she said.

New treaties

Mindful that treaty making has been a process fraught with disaster for many indigenous peoples, indigenous representatives at Kari-Oca and the Global Forum agreed on three important treaties.

The Kari-Oca Declaration and the Indigenous Peoples Earth Charter were signed only by indigenous people themselves. The Kari-Oca Declaration broadly asserts indigenous peoples’ rights to their land and traditions, and their commitment to protect the resources under their control for future generations. "We, the indigenous peoples, maintain our inherent rights to self determination," it reads. "We maintain our inalienable rights to our lands and territories. To all our resources - above and below - and to our waters, we assert our ongoing responsibility to pass these on to the future generations."

The 109-point Earth Charter elaborates on the principles of the Kari-Oca Declaration. It condemns specific practices which threaten indigenous societies and cultures, such as population transfer schemes and toxic and nuclear waste dumping on indigenous lands. It demands that indigenous treaties be taken seriously by governments and calls for UN enforcement of them. It also proposes that the United Nations, at the request of affected indigenous peoples, be given the authority to send indigenous representatives, in a peace-keeping capacity, into territories where conflicts arise. The Charter demands that governments demarcate indigenous lands and grant indigenous people autonomy over them. It emphasizes the importance of indigenous people cultivating local crops for local consumption. And it holds that indigenous peoples have a right to maintain their traditional way of life.

Indigenous representatives also negotiated a treaty with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participating in the Global Forum. The treaty, as Araujo explained, is based on mutual commitments between indigenous people and NGOs. Barbara Bramble, director of the U.S.-based National Wildlife Federation’s international program, agrees. "The treaty has mutual promises," she said, "not just support ... going in one direction." In the treaty, NGOs commit themselves to support the demarcation of indigenous territories and to provide financial assistance to indigenous programs. Noting that indigenous peoples "have developed economic, social and cultural models that respect nature without destroying it," the treaty requires indigenous people to agree to maintain and promote their value and economic systems, including communal ownership of land, as a means of protecting biodiversity and other natural resources.

Indigenous representatives put great stock in the indigenous-NGO treaty. "The treaty begins a new kind of work in which indigenous people and white people can work together," said the Inter-Tribal Committee’s Terena. The parties take the commitments in the treaty seriously, he added. "We don’t want to sign the way the U.S. government signed treaties with indigenous people 50 and 100 years ago."

Labor
Labor’s Lost Right to Strike
by Holly Knaus

ORGANIZED LABOR SUFFERED a significant defeat in June when a pro-business Republican contingent in the Senate blocked legislation prohibiting employers from hiring permanent replacements for striking workers. Supporters of the striker replacement bill failed by three votes to limit debate and move the measure toward passage. Senate Republicans, led by Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, had threatened a filibuster if the bill failed to get the 60 votes necessary to impose cloture.

The bill was introduced in the House by William Clay, D-Missouri, and in the Senate by Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. The House approved the bill last July. The Senate voted twice in one week against imposing cloture on the bill, despite a desperate last-minute concession by the AFL-CIO which would have limited unions’ ability to strike in exchange for restrictions on the use of permanent replacements.

"We are extremely disappointed," says Dick Blin, spokesperson for the United Paperworkers International Union, a union which has been hit hard by business’s permanent replacement offensive.

Replacement workers: a growth industry

The Supreme Court established the right of employers to permanently replace workers striking for economic reasons in its 1938 decision, Labor Board v. Mackay Radio. (Permanent replacements cannot be hired in lockouts or strikes over unfair labor practices.) The Mackay Radio ruling has been widely criticized since its seems to contradict the 1935 National Labor Relations Act’s guarantee of the right to strike without fear of being fired. Union leaders hold that the distinction between being "fired" and being "permanently replaced" is meaningless.

Employers have increasingly turned to the permanent replacement tactic as an important tool in their full-scale assault on unions. In 1981, then-President Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers and hired permanent replacement workers to fill their jobs. Since then, management has brought in permanent replacement workers in many major U.S. strikes, including ones at Ravenswood , Phelps Dodge , International Paper , Eastern, Greyhound , the Daily News and Pittston [see Replacing the Union: Business’s Labor Offensive," Multinational Monitor, April 1991 ]. More than 55,000 striking workers saw permanent replacements fill their jobs in 1990 and 1991, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, and 55 percent or approximately 29,000 did not return to their jobs at the conclusion of the dispute.

Union officials say that employers’ threats to use permanent replacements undermine collective bargaining by undercutting workers’ ability to strike. Management gains an unfair negotiating advantage if the law allows employers to replace striking workers with a lower-paid, non-union workforce, they claim. Employers increasingly advertise for replacements even before negotiations begin, putting unions on the defensive in contract negotiations.

Jack Sheehan, legislative director for the United Steelworkers of America, says that the permanent replacement issue is particularly crucial during periods such as the current economic downturn. When the economy is robust, he says, management is reluctant to force a strike and lose production time. However, during harsher economic periods, business "may want to push for cuts, pass it on to the workers and take the risk of bringing in replacements," if workers resist wage and benefit cutbacks.

Concessions fail again

On June 11, the AFL-CIO announced its willingness to limit workers’ ability to strike in exchange for passage of the striker replacement bill. The labor concession was embodied in an amendment to the bill proposed by Senator Bob Packwood, R-Oregon, and accepted by Metzenbaum.

The Packwood amendment would have barred employers from bringing in permanent replacements only if the union first sought to send unresolved disputes before a three-member fact-finding panel appointed by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and then accepted the panel’s recommendations. If the union refused to submit the dispute to the panel or rejected its recommendations, management would be free to hire striker replacements.

The conditioning of a ban on permanent replacements on unions’ acceptance of binding arbitration represented a major concession by the U.S. labor movement, which has long resisted limits on its right to strike as a matter of principle and survival. In a June 11 statement on the amendment, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland attempted to justify the labor organization’s acceptance of a measure that would limit unions’ right to strike: "Union members do not fear the fact-finding process. It is consistent with their goal of peaceably resolving disputes with their employers and thereby avoiding strikes. ... We can support [the amendment]." AFL-CIO spokesperson Muriel Cooper says the decision to support the amendment was made with the conviction that the bill "would still protect workers and workers’ rights."

Blin, who says that the striker replacement bill was the "number one legislative priority" of the Paperworkers, acknowledges that the amendment "watered down" the bill. He says, however, that labor supported it in the belief that adding the provision to the bill "was the only way it had a chance of passing." Labor leaders hoped the amendment would mollify industry complaints that banning striker replacements would induce unreasonable wage demands.

The Packwood amendment was "a last ditch effort to gain [the votes of] some Republicans, and maybe some of the Southern Dixiecrats," says Blin. Both he and Sheehan agree, however, that the amendment failed to gain the bill any votes.

Blin and other union officials were particularly angered by the position of the Democratic senators from Arkansas, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, both of whom voted against imposing cloture. The Paperworkers have the largest union membership in that state. The bill had the support of Arkansas Governor and Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton, says Blin, who wonders why the state’s senators failed to move the bill toward passage. "Why not land it on Bush’s desk and make an election issue out of it?" he asks, noting that the President was expected to veto the legislation had it been passed by Congress.

The Steelworkers have large membership in aluminum smelting facilities in Arkansas, and Sheehan expressed "deep disappointment" in the two senators.

By voting against limiting debate, Sheehan says, senators were able to protect themselves and Bush from "exposing their position. It’s a convenient way to avoid taking a vote on an issue" and it enabled Bush to avoid imposing an unpopular veto. Senate Republicans used "the filibuster tactic to protect themselves and the president" from taking a stand on controversial legislation, he argues.

Hoping for a better day

Cooper says that "workers will think about this when they go to the polls" in November. Blin thinks that a turnover in Congress and in the White House may pave the way for the passage of similar legislation next year.

Sheehan, however, is uncertain whether the legislation will be re-introduced into the next Congress. He hopes that a turnover in the White House will lead to more sweeping labor reforms that would address the permanent replacement tactic along with many other issues. However, he says, if Bush manages to hold on to the presidency, labor will again be confronted with an anti-worker administration, and would certainly face a veto of any legislation attempting to limit the rights of employers.

Names in the News

A Smoking Decision

IN A DECISION THAT APPEARS TO CLEAR THE WAY for lawsuits accusing tobacco companies of deceiving the public about the dangers of smoking, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the federal law requiring cigarette warning labels does not protect manufacturers from being sued.

The seven-to-two decision in Cipollone v. Ligget Group Inc., Philip Morris Co. Inc. and Lorillard Inc. "is an almost complete victory," says Richard Daynard of the Tobacco Products Liability Project. "It’s certainly a victory on anything that really matters to us in the case."

No lawsuit has so far succeeded in forcing a tobacco company to pay damages to smokers who claim they were harmed by the product.

The decision bars litigation charging tobacco companies with failing to provide adequate warnings, and plaintiffs cannot argue that the use of healthy people in cigarette ads counteracts the federally mandated warning language.

Tobacco companies called the decision a victory because plaintiffs will have to prove that industry misled the public about the dangers of tobacco. A Philip Morris statement said, "While the Court failed to hold that claims based on breach of express warranties or intentional misrepresentation are preempted, this should have little practical effect on the litigation." Tobacco companies insist that there has never been any fraud on the part of the industry.

But Daynard says that there has only been one case that has gone to a jury dealing with fraud by the tobacco industry about the dangers of cigarettes. Recent information about public deception on the part of the tobacco companies was not available in that case, Daynard says. "The defendants’ spin has historically been, ‘no jury is going to be moved by the cries of a smoker who continued to smoke after the warnings came on.’ But that’s because juries haven’t seen what the tobacco companies have been doing. Now they’re going to be confronted with the tobacco industry’s behavior."

Diamond Cartel

GENERAL ELECTRIC (GE) WAS INVOLVED in a price-fixing scheme and other improprieties that exposed the company to large financial losses, charges a lawsuit filed by GE shareholders.

The lawsuit, brought by GE shareholder Thomas Hughes against the GE Board of Directors and GE, is based on allegations made in another recent lawsuit by Edward Russell, a former GE employee, which charges that GE conspired with a South African company to fix prices in the industrial diamond market.

The diamond market is a $600 million a year industry. GE and DeBeers Consolidated Mines control approximately 90 percent of the world market for industrial diamonds. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into GE’s relations with DeBeers.

GE spokesperson George Jamison denies the allegations and dismisses Russell as nothing more than a disgruntled employee. DeBeers also denies the charges.

The shareholder complaint charges that on several occasions GE intentionally refrained from taking advantage of opportunities to make inroads into DeBeers’s market and potentially increase profits by $50 to $100 million per year in order to keep from undermining the price-fixing agreement.

Mark Rifkin, an attorney in the suit against GE, says that company shareholders should not be forced to absorb the cost of any fines assessed. "If the company is penalized or fined, we would expect that the individual defendants would be responsible for those damages," he says, not GE stockholders.

Pesticide Disputes

ABOUT 1,000 COSTA RICAN WORKERS who claimed in a Texas court that a pesticide applied on a banana plantation in Costa Rica caused them to become sterile are close to settling their claims with the Dow Chemical Company , Shell Oil Company and Standard Fruit Company for $20 million [see The South’s Day in Court," Multinational Monitor, July/August 1990 ].

But Charles Siegel, the lawyer who moved the cases through the Texas court system, has left the Dallas plaintiffs’ firm of Baron & Budd, the firm he worked at for six years, after a dispute with the firm over what he claims were the conditions of settlement.

According to Siegel, the defendant companies sought, as a condition of settlement, that the case be converted into a class action "to foreclose any future liability and to wrap that kind of litigation up once and for all."

Baron & Budd would not agree to that condition, according to Siegel.

However, Baron & Budd did agree not to bring any future similar cases, Siegel charges. "That is fine for Baron & Budd," he says. "It was a firm decision not to continue that kind of litigation anyway. But it was not an agreement that I wanted to be part of."

Fred Baron, lead partner in the Baron & Budd firm, says that Siegel left the firm because he was denied a partnership. "It is absolutely not true that he left the firm because there was a condition in the settlement that Baron & Budd not take any more of these cases."

Siegel has left the firm to set up his own practice representing workers injured by the pesticide, dibromochloropropane (DBCP).

- Ben Lilliston

Book Review
Debt and Development

The Development Dictionary:

A Guide to Knowledge as Power

Edited by Wolfgang Sachs

London: Zed Books, 1992

306 pp.

Reviewed by Holley Knaus

IN A JANUARY 20, 1949 SPEECH, President Harry Truman stated, "We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas." As Truman and countless other leaders and experts saw it, achieving U.S.- and European- style industrial societies was the goal of the "development" path, meaning that Third World, rural, indigenous and subsistence cultures had a long way to go.

The contributors to The Development Dictionary trace the beginning of the "Age of Development" to this speech of Truman’s. Development theorists believed their prescription would lift the world’s population out of perceived poverty and misery by turning peasants and subsistence farmers into wage-earners and consumers. Thirty years later, industrialization’s toll on society and the environment becomes more and more clear, and the gap in wealth between North and South has greatly widened.

Development has failed and is dying as a project, The Development Dictionary contributors write, but the development mindset has been absorbed by government and U.N. officials, by grassroots activists in the North and the South, by citizens of industrialized countries and by the millions of people who in 1949 suddenly became "underdeveloped." The Development Dictionary is a collection of critical essays which explore several concepts associated with development, such as needs, environment, poverty and progress. The essays trace the historical and anthropological evolution of these terms, exposing their loaded meanings and the biases on which they are constructed. The critics argue that development is more than a socio-economic program, but is indeed a particular "cast of mind" that is based on dangerously flawed premises and has the power to "mold reality."

Current use of "development" simplifies the term to the point where the end purpose of the process becomes nothing more than the achievement of the U.S. model of an industrial cash economy. The traditional meaning of the word, evolved from biology and philosophy, from Darwin, Hegel and Marx, was all but wiped out when the term was co-opted by Truman.

Gustavo Esteva writes, "Two hundred years of social construction of the historical-political meaning of the term, development, were successfully usurped and transmogrified. A political and philosophical proposition of Marx, packaged American- style as a struggle against communism and at the service of the hegemonic design of the United States, succeeded in permeating both the popular and intellectual mind for the rest of the century."

Contributors blast the idea that the U.S. (and European) model represents the ideal end goal of the historical process. The environmental crisis reveals too clearly the failure of this model, and will only be compounded if the South continues to develop along Northern lines. Wolfgang Sachs writes, "If all countries ‘sucessfully’ followed the industrial example, five or six planets would be needed to serve as mines and waste dumps. It is thus obvious that the ‘advanced’ societies are no model; rather they are most likely to be seen in the end as an aberration in the course of history."

Destruction of cultural diversity has been another of development’s major crimes. The Development Dictionary contributors argue that there is an inherent bias against cultural diversity in the development project; if there is only one mode of ideal existence (the U.S.-European industrial model) then other cultures are somehow backwards or behind or "underdeveloped." As Sachs writes, "In this view, Tuaregs, Zapotecos or Rajasthanis are not seen as living diverse and non-comparable ways of human existence, but as somehow lacking in terms of what has been achieved by the advanced countries. Consequently, catching up was declared to be their historical task. From the start, development’s hidden agenda was nothing else than the Westernization of the world."

Development has failed on less theoretical and more concrete grounds as well: in 1960, Northern countries were 20 times richer than Southern countries; they are now 46 times richer. More devastating perhaps is the destruction of traditional ways of life and the simultaneous failure to provide a viable alternative to historic lifestyles. Sachs writes, "People are caught in the deadlock of development: the peasant who is dependent on buying seeds, yet finds no cash to do so; the mother who benefits neither from the care of her fellow women in the community nor from the assistance of a hospital. ... Shunned by the ‘advanced’ sector and cut off from the old ways ... they are forced to get by in the no- man’s-land between tradition and modernity."

The Development Dictionary is a scholarly work which examines the language and concepts of development theory in great detail, taking for granted the horrendous consequences of the practical application of this theory. The premise behind the book is that language both reveals and shapes perceptions, and that perceptions in turn shape policy.

The highly academic style of the book may frustrate some readers who question the importance of tracing the history of certain words and concepts. The book, however, represents more than just an intellectual exercise. The essays are written with anger and compassion, and with the premise that development discourse has become so pervasive - and so limiting - that it must be challenged at its roots. As Sachs writes in his introduction, "Our essays on the central concepts in the development discourse intend to expose some of the unconscious structures that set boundaries on the thinking of our epoch. We believe that any imaginative effort to conceive a post-development era will have to overcome these constraints."

The essays set out to challenge not only policymakers but activists of both the North and South who have fallen into using this type of language - Multinational Monitor, for example, which often refers to "developing countries." The Development Dictionary demands that activists question their own biases and ways in which their analysis may be tainted or limited. It paves the way for a discussion in which non-Western ways of life are not seen as aberrations, but as viable alternatives.

The Debt Boomerang:

How Third World Debt Harms Us All

By Susan George

London: Pluto Press, 1992

202 pp.

Reviewed by Natalie Avery

THE DEVASTATING IMPACT of the Third World debt on the poor countries of the South has been well-documented. The direct and indirect consequences of the debt burden have included cutbacks in health programs and related outbreaks of disease, like cholera; surging unemployment; and overexploited rainforests and other natural resources. Social movements - both sporadic and sustained - have emerged throughout the Third World in response to the debt crisis and related issues, and academics and activists in both the North and South have produced numerous studies detailing the debt’s harsh toll on developing countries. Even the monolithic World Bank has begun to respond to this pressure, by at least rhetorically acknowledging the need for a change in approach to the grinding problems which continue to crush the South.

Susan George, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute, is among the league of critics who have spent their careers working to expose the failure of development policies in the Third World. Her first book, published in 1976, How the Other Half Dies, explores the political, social and trade policies that cause world hunger and exacerbate disparities between rich and poor peoples and nations. In her 1988 A Fate Worse than Debt, George examines the anatomy and handling of the debt crisis, suggesting alternative approaches. While the work of George and her colleagues has helped spark concern for problems in the Third World, a mass movement calling for definitive action to change the policies behind the suffering has failed to materialize. If Northern governments and multilateral lending agencies are to take more than rhetorical steps toward reform, public pressure against them must increase.

George’s latest work, The Debt Boomerang, argues that while the movements of those suffering from debt in the Third World are essential, reform will only occur when more citizens in the North become involved in the struggle.

In The Debt Boomerang, George and her colleagues move away from moral appeals to people in the North to work to resolve the debt crisis, concluding those entreaties have proven vastly insufficient. While acknowledging that the effects of the debt crisis weigh overwhelmingly on the South, George and her colleagues hope to convince more people in the North of the need for change than has previously been possible by bringing to light the impact of the crisis on the North. She writes in her introduction, "We hope this book may show that while any standard of human decency or any ethical imperative demands a change in debt management, so does enlightened self interest."

George launches The Debt Boomerang with an analysis of the relationship between environmental devastation and the debt crisis of the 1980s. While touching on several environmental issues, this chapter focuses on the massive deforestation that has taken place in the last decade. George argues that the pressure to increase export earnings to keep up with debt service payments stimulated increased exports of timber and beef (involving the clearing of forestland for grazing pasture). Similar pressures have resulted in the destruction of mangrove forests in coastal areas to make way for ponds to increase shrimp and prawn harvests for export.

George stresses that, rather than trying to prove "a crude, one to one causality," she is endeavoring to show "some extremely disturbing correlations." She and a team of researchers found that the largest Third World debtors deforested the most or the fastest during the 1980s. Further, they discovered that many deforesting nations also had extremely high debt service ratios, the ratio of debt payments to export earnings which indicates the relative weight of a country’s debt.

The repercussion of this massive deforestation takes its toll on both the North and the South through the build-up of greenhouse gases which concentrate in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. George writes that "deforestation itself is contributing more today to the greenhouse effect than it did a decade ago before the debt crisis emerged. ... Forests ... act as ‘sinks’ for absorbing carbon dioxide, so the fewer the trees, the less carbon can be removed from the atmosphere. [C]utting or burning of timber emits the familiar greenhouse trio: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide whose presence in the atmosphere increased significantly between 1979 and 1989."

George argues that environmentalists must recognize the linkages between the debt and environmental devastation if they are to be effective. She ends this chapter with an appeal to those fighting for the earth to adopt a broader perspective that includes recognition of the negative impact of Northern economic policies on the South.

Another repercussion of the debt crisis, George argues, is manifested in the growing drug problem in the North. While the U.S. government bombs coca crops and mounts pressure against the governments of Peru , Bolivia and Colombia , it scarcely acknowledges the economic issues that underlie these countries’ dependence on the drug trade.

Despite massive U.S. pressure against the drug suppliers and growers in the South, market forces have prevailed. The coca export trade has been so successful in earning foreign exchange for these countries that they are now virtually dependent on the coca growing and processing industry to service their huge debts. Furthermore, George argues that indebted Latin American countries are more likely to facilitate drug export industries in order to provide some means of survival for the tens of thousands of people displaced by International Monetary Fund economic austerity programs who cannot find a livelihood in the legal economy. "The government has promulgated several different measures designed to recycle coca dollars into the economy," a Bolivian economist told George.

George does not argue that the drug problem would be instantly resolved if the debt problem were dealt with constructively. But she does believe that policymakers must examine both the deeper issues behind the demand for drugs and the desperation that forces nations, with their governments’ acquiescence, into a dependence on supplying the North with these substances.

Taxpayers in the North are adversely affected by the debt crisis in other ways. While the frenzied and irresponsible lending policies of Northern banks have caused the most profound suffering in the Third World, Northern citizens are themselves paying for the banks’ recklessness. George analyzes the web of government regulations and tax breaks which enables banks to write off Third World debt as "losses" for tax purposes, while continuing to extract debt service payments from those loans. The banks thus collect a huge subsidy from Northern taxpayers.

The debt crisis has also resulted in job loss in the North. Debt-strapped Third World countries compete for industries by selling themselves as low-wage havens for multinationals which eagerly shift production from the North to the South in order to take advantage of paltry environmental and labor standards and regulation. Furthermore, many Third World countries, adhering to strict structural adjustment programs (export-driven austerity measures usually involving trade liberalization, privatization and reduced government spending), shrink their economies and devalue their currency, making imports more expensive. As a result, the North loses huge potential markets and sacrifices more jobs.

The Debt Boomerang is strongest when its analysis relies on well- documented facts and figures. The chapters on the environment, the drug trade, the banking industry and lost jobs and markets are each meticulously researched, lending strength to the book’s arguments on these issues. George’s analysis in the final sections of her book, however, rests on shakier ground. In these chapters, she attempts to link the debt crisis to problems of immigration and war. While George and her colleagues do make use of some compelling data in formulating these arguments, they ultimately fail to make the kinds of linkages established in the earlier chapters.

A major weakness of the chapter on conflict and war, written by George’s colleague Dan Smith, is its failure to bolster or even fully articulate the "boomerang" argument. Smith’s assertion that the poverty and deprivation generated by the debt crisis contributes to the growing violence in the Third World is indisputable. A debt-driven structural adjustment program clearly led to food riots in Venezuela , but the effect of that violence was felt minimally - if at all - in the North. The chapter’s focus on debt-related violence in the South is never tied to any consequences in the North (other than in one or two speculative paragraphs in the section’s conclusion), which serves to undercut the book’s stated premise of convincing Northern readers of their own interest in dealing constructively with the debt.

These weaknesses, however, do not detract significantly from the overall impact of the book. The Debt Boomerang is a convincing effort to persuade Northern citizens that they should care about the debt crisis for their own sake, as well as for the benefit of the Third World. Hundreds of millions of suffering people in Africa, Asia and Latin America can only hope it succeeds.

Resources

Organizations

Third World Network

87 Cantonment Road

10250 Penang

MALAYSIA

Greenpeace

1436 U Street, NW

Washington, DC 20009

Friends of the Earth

218 D Street, SE

Washington, DC 20003

Women’s Environment and

Development Organization

845 3d Avenue, 15th floor

New York, NY 10022

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)

c/o Wand, University of the

West Indies, School of

Continuing Studies

St. Michael

BARBADOS

UN Development Fund

for Women

304 East 45th Street, 6th Floor

New York, NY 10017

Natural Resources

Defense Council

1350 New York Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20005

Human Rights Watch

1522 K Street, NW, Suite 910

Washington, DC 20005

Greenbelt Movement

PO Box 67545

Nairobi

KENYA

United Paperworkers International Union

3340 Perimeter Hill Drive

Box 1475

Nashville, TN 37202

United Steelworkers of America

Five Gateway Center

Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Economic Policy Institute

1730 Rhode Island Avenue

Washington, DC 20036

World Rainforest Movement

87 Cantonment Road

10250 Penang

MALAYSIA

Indigenous Peoples Media Center

77 Main Street

Tappan, NY 10983

Assembly of First Nations

55 Murray Street, 5th Floor

Ottawa, Ontario

CANADA

International Indigenous

Commission

Palais Wilson, 52 Rue des Paquis

Geneva 1201

SWITZERLAND

Biotechnology Working Group

2395 University Avenue, Room 309

St. Paul, MN 55114

Environment Liaison Centre

International - Kenya

PO Box 72461

Nairobi

KENYA

Brazilian NGO Forum

Rua Borges dos Reis 46, Sala J

Boulevard Rio Vermelho

Salvador

BRAZIL

Brazil Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE)

Rua Vincente de Souza 29 - Botafoga

Rio de Janeiro

BRAZIL

International Forum of NGOs and Social Movements

Rua do Catete, #153

Museu da Republica 122220

Rio de Janeiro

BRAZIL

World Bank

GEF Administrator’s Office

1818 H Street, NW

Washington, DC 20433

Worldwatch Institute

1776 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20036

Books, Reports & Periodicals

Changing Course

Edited by Stephan Schmidheiny

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992

After The Earth Summit: The Future

of Environmental Governance (Worldwatch Paper 107)

By Hilary F. French

Washington, DC:

Worldwatch Institute, 1992

The Greenpeace Book of Greenwash

By Kenny Bruno

Washington, DC: Greenpeace, 1992

Defending the Earth: Abuses of

Human Rights and the Environment

Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch and NRDC, 1992

Women and the Environment

Prepared by Annabel Rodda

London: Zed Books, 1991

The Endangered Rainforests and

The Fight for Survival

Penang, Malaysia:

World Rainforest Movement, 1992

Human Development Report 1992

New York: United Nations

Development Program, 1992

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