Issue No. 602
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5 - 11 September 2002 Issue No. 602 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
One planet, two worlds
Until we can hold governments and corporations to account for their actions we can only stand back as they make the world uninhabitable, writes Mona Makram-Ebeid*
Apart from figuring out how economic growth can be sustained without harming the environment, Johannesburg 2002 and the conference's slogan "People-Planet-Prosperity" had particular significance as a mirror on global social development issues, the protection of natural resources and the curse of poverty. The giant leap from Sandton, where the summit's main conference centre is situated, with its sophisticated First World hotels, office blocks and shopping malls, to the squalid, card-board shanties of Soweto, the sprawling township that was once the black apartheid labour pool for Johannesburg's white-owned commercial and industrial sectors, represents just the sort of gulf between rich and poor that delegates to the summit were discussing.
Around 50,000 participants, including 100 or so heads of state and government, have flocked to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. But who will leaders be listening to? The voice of big business, which does not want to see far reaching policies agreed at the summit, or the voices of communities? That question reflected better than any other the disturbing gap in thinking between rich and poor nations. Both agree that enriching the world must not be at the expense of the environment. However, there is very little consensus on how to realise that objective, particularly when we know that three billion people live on less than $2 a day and one billion have no access to drinking water.
Since 1992, when the UN-convened Earth Summit focused on the environment and development in Rio de Janeiro, the state of the world has deteriorated. On climate change, for example, it was reported that global warming in the past 50 years was attributable to human activities and that by 2100 temperatures would have increased by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade. In recent weeks newspapers around the world have been dominated by environmental headlines: in Central Europe flooding killed dozens, displaced tens of thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage. In South Asia a brown cloud of pollution has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from respiratory disease. The pollution, 80 per cent man-made, also cuts sunlight penetration, thus reducing rainfall, affecting agriculture and otherwise altering the climate.
Many other examples of environmental degradation, often related to the warming of the atmosphere, were cited at the conference. What they all have in common is that they severely affect countries around the world and are fast becoming a major concern of people everywhere. So when a country that emits 25 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases acts as an uninterested, sometimes hostile bystander in the environmental debate, it looks like unbearable arrogance to many people abroad. And here I would like to cite a Uruguayan journalist at the conference who said: "The US is practicing environmental terrorism without the slightest remorse, as though the good Lord had given it a certificate of immunity for giving up smoking. For them the arms industry is the only investment worthy of confidence: President Bush has announced a military budget of one billion dollars a day. In other words, the ruling powers of the planet reason with bombs: they are power itself, a gigantic power that humiliates nature; it exercises its freedom to convert air into filth and its right to leave humanity without a home; it calls these horrors errors, flattens whoever gets in its way, is deaf to all warnings and breaks whatever it touches." To these scathing words another participant replied that, ironically, with devotion and enthusiasm, the south of the world copies and expands upon the worst habits of the north, but receives none of its virtues. It adopts the American religion of the automobile and its scorn for public transportation, as well as the mythology of the free market and consumer society. The south also receives, with open arms, the filthiest, most nature-toxic factories in exchange for wages that make one nostalgic for slavery. So what is the state of today's world? Ten years after the Rio Earth Summit we are still far from ending the economic and environmental marginalisation that afflicts billions of people and face increasingly widening divides -- wealth, health, education, digital and so on -- between the industrialised and developing worlds.
Some view these divides as a consequences of globalisation. But is globalisation the cause of these divides? Officials of the World Bank, the IMF or the World Trade Organisation will say that globalisation has improved the world by increasing international trade and capital flows, transferring technical know- how and giving jobs to developing countries. People from Third World countries, on the other hand, as well as critics of globalisation, see it otherwise. For them globalisation is nothing but a process by which the rich and powerful employ the fruits of wealth at the expense of the poor and powerless, and international institutions are responsible for all the mishaps that it causes. In Globalisation and its Discontents, a very influential study that will soon be translated in Arabic, the 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues that, as well meaning as they may be, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have failed to deliver the benefits of globalisation to the developing world.
In other words the "Washington Consensus" ideology is facing growing scepticism everywhere. We see clearly that unfettered capitalism is driven by Wall Street's speculative expectations or corporate growth and ever rising stock prices. These are features of the same financial system that leads pharmaceutical companies to manipulate patent laws, keep drug prices high and even bring law suits to try and prevent countries from manufacturing low- cost generics, as in the use of drugs for AIDS. And it is precisely these obsolete economic ideologies that drive the Bush administration's geo-economic policies, from pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to its trashing of so many UN treaties, cutting funds for family planning and weakening the UN Monetary Consensus on Financing for Development.
What about education? No country has ever succeeded in lifting its citizens out of deprivation without improving its educational system, which is why universal primary education is one of the UN's eight anti-poverty Millennium Goals. The costs of achieving it -- $7-8 billion a year in addition to current spending -- is the equivalent of four days of military spending around the world. Poverty and backwardness should be addressed in terms of access to education and essential resources and confronting the poverty of vision and lack of courage that is preventing those who have knowledge and wealth from changing their own consumption patterns and providing more assistance to people and ecosystems in need. As we stray further from the goal of international solidarity the need for a global ethical system has never been stronger. Until we can hold governments and corporations to account for their international actions we can only stand back as they permit the world to become unfit for human habitation. Otherwise, how many more decades must it take, lumbering incoherently from one summit to the next, to confront the core reality that our economies either develop sustainably or they will not be developing at all.
* The writer, a former MP, is professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo.
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