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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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A week in the world
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Trading places
By Peter SnowdonIt was just another humdrum week when it came to "natural" disasters -- you know, the ones caused by all those factories burning up all that cheap coal and, especially, cheap petrol. In Central America, hundreds died in freak floods, from El Salvador to Oaxaca, and over quarter of a million were left homeless, as a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico delivered up 15 inches of rain in a matter of days. It was the worst flooding to hit the region in over 40 years. Entire villages were swept away. Mexico itself was particularly badly hit, while in Honduras, much of the restoration work only recently completed after the country was struck by Hurricane Mitch last year has been destroyed.
I guess it's only appropriate, then, that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) should have chosen this week to release a report on the effects of free trade on the environment.
According to Mike Moore, newly-appointed WTO director general and former Labour (sic) prime minister of New Zealand -- who single-handedly destroyed the welfare state when he wasn't busy repealing the vast majority of the country's labour laws -- "open trade leads to higher living standards for working families which in turn leads to a cleaner environment." And in any case, if the report is to be believed, most of the pollution is a result of the production process itself, not of trade as such.
In case you didn't get Mike's argument, let me run it past you once again.
More trade is good for the environment, because it makes people wealthier. And the wealthier people are, the less likely they are to put up with having cement factories, and waste incinerators, and steel works, and petrochemical plants, spewing out noxious fumes into their back garden, just because they want to have a nice apartment block to live in, and lots of shiny stainless steel pans so they can pan-fry calves' livers.
So they lobby their governments, because rich people have democratic governments, which are cool. And the democratic governments don't like it when the rich people get all restless, because they know they're liable to go down into the street in their Range Rovers and their Mitsubishi Lancers and demand their rights, and some of them might even put on their best Caterpillar boots and go and man some tastefully hand-crafted wrought-iron barricades and bring the government down, and institute the People's Republic of Beverley Hills. And that won't go down at all well with the people at Westpoint and Sandhurst, and at Dassault and Boeing Aviation, and all the others who gave their lives for freedom, etc.
So the government thinks, "Let's have more 'open' trade", and so they go out and sign NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) etc., and everyone else signs too, because the little countries are nervous of the democratic governments, not quite the same way the democratic governments are nervous of the rich people, but something like that.
And so the democratic governments move half the chimney stacks and waste pipes and land-fill sites to Detroit or Liverpool, where the people aren't quite as rich as all that, for which, of course, they have only themselves to blame. And the other half they move to a country whose government is not quite so democratic, because the people are not yet rich enough and to appreciate the finer points of democracy, and could easily be misled by smooth-talking politicians if they weren't protected from themselves -- some little country like Mexico, for example, with its millennial Mayan civilisation theme-parks and its unfortunately underdeveloped drainage system.
And then they build highways and airports to connect all the undemocratic countries to the democratic ones, so that they can bring all this stuff which the undemocratic people wouldn't know what to do with, like the white goods and the kitchen accessories and the ecologically-friendly petrol-sparing cars, to the place where the factories and the plants used to be till the people grew out of them and became so refined and so principled they could only appreciate really nice things, and just plain began to look down on anyone who was stupid enough to put up with the smoke and the poisonous chemicals and the industrial accidents and the astronomically high leukemia incidence rates, and so on.
And then the democratic governments introduce all sorts of useful regulations, which make sure that the chimneys and the factories and the open sewers don't start to reappear where they shouldn't, and which also, purely by coincidence, make sure that setting up in business is now so hideously expensive that almost no one can afford all the compulsory clean-air, clean-water technology, and the regular environmental inspections, just like they can't afford to open a huge plant in a neighbouring country along with all the computers necessary to run it, and the trilingual lawyers and accountants to do all the paperwork, and the brand new lorries to ship the goods north. And so even as the number of factories grows, the number of people who own the factories gets smaller and smaller, and the factories themselves get further and further away, until they're just a speck on the horizon; why, you can hardly see them at all...
And that's why, when all the rich people look out of their windows in the morning, you can hear them go, "Wow, Laurie! I guess I must have dreamt it all!" And then they go down to the kitchen, and they see that the fridge is still there, and the electricity is still working, and their new iMac is still switched on, and the concrete floor in the garage hasn't caved in, and the tripes de boeuf à la mode de Ca‘n they knocked up for supper when they got back from the school governors' meeting is still in the casserole on the stove, and they call the bank, and their broker, and their aunt in Cape Cod, and everyone is still there, and they all still love them.
And then they turn round to all the poor people in the poor countries and they say: "You see? If you were better off like us, and better educated, and had a free press, and respected the rights of man (and, mostly, of woman too), you'd want to live in a clean country, just like us. And if you worked as hard as we do, you'd be able to afford it!"
And meanwhile all the rich people in the poor countries just cross their fingers, and smile, and don't say nothing.
So that's alright then, isn't it?
Only the problem is, that it isn't alright, even for the rich democratic people, because while all the poor undemocratic people are dying of bronchial pneumonia and heavy-metal poisoning, and the rich democratic people are smoking one last highly-democratic cigarette and gazing out of their windows onto the garden of Eden, all the stuff they can't see -- all the exhaust fumes from all the lorries and all the gases from all the factories -- quantities of waste that have to be buried, or burned at the stake, just to try and get rid of them, and which none of them care whether you're a democrat or a dictator, aren't just sitting there. They're rising up. They're filling the air across the whole of the damned sky that covers the whole of the damned planet. Only, like the factories and the chimney stacks, the sky is so far away, and so thin, and so delicate, that we can't see what's happening to it.
And that's the beauty of it, really. That's the profound, sublime, ironic justice of it all. For not only can we not see what we're doing to others any more -- we can't even see what we're doing to ourselves.
