Socialist Action /September 2002
Earth Summit Hijacked by Imperialist
Powers
By Laurent Menghini
The UN Earth Summit took place in Johannesburg from Aug. 26 to Sept.
4. While the agreements made at the 1992 Rio Convention have still not been
applied, the big powers, in collusion with the biggest multinationals, have
been claiming to want to promote sustainable development.
"Sustainable development" has become a happy hunting ground
for political marketing, but also an angle for extending the market. In
Johannesburg, capital was king. The multinationals were everywhere. Two
hundred board chairmen from the big companies made the trip.
Tony Blair, who is as green as he is left, insisted that the British
delegation include several big capitalist bosses, including the chiefs of
Thames Water, a water treatment company that that been condemned by violating
environmental rights even in England, and Rio Tinto, the world's number
one mining trust, which is currently trying to get rights to tap the uranium
in Australia's Kakadu nature preserve.
As for the poor, they were kept away from the summit. The South African
landless (who rallied outside the meeting hall in the tens of thousands)
were kept under overwhelming police vigilance and threatened with ruthless
repression if they ever took it into their heads to come to disturb the
summit.
This picture is symptomatic of the evolution since the first Earth Summit
in Rio 10 years ago. It may be remembered that Rio was often touted as a
hope. After the victories for democracy proclaimed at the time of the fall
of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe and the so-called triumph
of law at the time of the Gulf War, the Rio summit was seen by some as proof
that by making a few adjustments, world capitalism could prosper without
harming the environment.
Ten years later, the balance sheet is as negative for the environment
as the results of Putin's "democracy" for the Chechens or of the
"war for international law" for the starving Iraqis. These hopes
were a total deception. Curiously, everyone seems to recognize this but
without wanting to see the cause-that is, imperialism.
In order to understand what has happened, we really have to rehabilitate
the intimidating word "imperialism," since it makes it possible
to evaluate the contending forces. The Soviet collapse was an opportunity
for the U.S. to redeploy its power on a world scale. The so-called war on
terror is only the latest episode of this.
This reorganization has benefited fully from the dynamic of capitalist
globalization that was set in motion 20 years ago, with its chain of trade
liberalizations and privatizations. The result has been a spectacular increase
in inequalities on a world scale and a reinforcement of the hierarchies
that defend them. In this evolution, the environment has not been spared,
neither in the developed nor the underdeveloped world.
No action on global warming
What happened to the firewalls erected in Rio, in particular the conventions
on global warming and biodiversity, to take the examples most often cited?
Everywhere they have been undermined by market forces.
While the grim predictions about global warming seem to have been confirmed
both by the results of scientific research and by an accumulation of spectacular
meterological events, the Kyoto Protocol for application of the 1992 Rio
Convention has not been ratified, much less applied. In order to facilitate
its formal ratification it has been interpreted virtually out of existence
in the recent conferences in Bonn and Marrakesh.
The market for rights to pollute, which at the start was only an option,
has now become the alpha and omega of the convention, with the rich polluters
being able to buy rights to pollute the underdeveloped countries.
Above all, the oil and petroleum lobbies, which arrived in the center
of power in the baggage of Bush Junior, have imposed a rejection of the
protocol by the world's main polluter, compounded by a relaunching of oil
and uranium prospecting. Thus, Australia has refused to ratify the protocol
on global warming.
In any case, the objectives of the protocol are entirely insufficient
to stop the accumulation of gases that cause a greenhouse effect. Its application
would only be a limited step forward, and even that seems unattainable today.
But global warming was not an official subject of discussion in Johannesburg.
Biodiversity, on the other hand, was on the summit agenda. Far from facilitating
the conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable use, the 1992 Rio convention
set in place mechanisms for commercial exploitation of its genetic resources
in particular. Recognizing every country's sovereignty over its natural
resources, the convention aimed at regulating trade between the developed
and underdeveloped countries by preventing biopiracy.
Ten years later, the result is hardly conclusive. In the absence of financial
resources and methods to transfer technology, the richest sources of biodiversity-including
the Brazilian, African, and Indonesian tropical rain forests-are continuing
to be extensively exploited and are disappearing at a rapid rate.
Thus, every year, thousands of unknown plant and animal species are disappearing
forever, and we are losing an immense body of knowledge that could have
incalculable results.
The World Environmental Fund (WEF), which is supposed to finance sustainable
energy products, has been given ridiculously meager resources. Moreover,
its objective is to finance the additional costs required for protecting
the environment.
The result is that it is paying for repairing the damage done to the
environment by projects that are often "sustainable" only in name.
Although they have sovereignty over their resources, the underdeveloped
countries often have no choice but to make deals with multinationals that
give them the right to exploit these resources at a minimum cost.
The transfers of technology involved often do not make it possible to
improve the conditions for this utilization, whose benefit goes to the richer
partner.
Green label put on big business
No new convention came out of the Johannesburg Summit. The only thing
on offer is an action plan that is at the center of negotiations among the
various governments. The proposed plan is put in the context of an explicitly
free-trade perspective in the light of the commitments made at the WTO conference
in Qatar earlier this year.
After the resounding failure of Agenda 21, an interminable list of recommendations
approved in Rio, the flavor of the month is "type-1 and type-2 initiatives,"
to use the UN jargon.
"Type-2 initiatives" are schemes for sustainable development
involving the "civil society," which includes the multinationals.
The latter are being strongly encouraged by the UN to participate in the
vast "Global Compact" scheme" launched in 1999.
The multinationals seem to have quite a taste for these projects, which
enable them to pin a green label on themselves, or even get state cofinancing
or approval for operations that are basically money makers with dubious
environmental objectives. Thus, Shell has involved itself in prospecting
for natural gas in the Philippines, Croplife International -a group of companies
making pesticides and herbicides-is setting up a program for training in
the use of pesticides, and so forth.
There is not even a requirement for financing a genuinely "sustainable"
project. "Sustainable development" has become an angle for legitimatizing
penetration of the markets of underdeveloped countries by companies, including
some of the worst polluters.
Type-1 initiatives, which involve public institutions, are not necessarily
any better. Here also the various governments aim to set up operations
that serve their industrial or commercial interests immediately or ultimately.
Thus, the United States has just announced that it will participate in an
operation to preserve the Congo basin forest. If course, there is absolutely
no connection with perspectives for exploiting the rich oil resources in
the area!
Johannesburg marked the advent of a hypocritical "green capitalism"
designed to make us think that it can save the planet. There is no chance
that the commitments made about water or cleaning up energy production will
be kept, just as the Rio commitments have not been kept or those of the
FAO summits on world hunger.
As long the total liberalization of trade is not challenged, as long
as the WTO accords take precedence over preserving the environment, the
environment is going to continue to be devastated.
This is a slightly abridged version of an article in the Sept. 5 issue
of Rouge, the weekly paper of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnnaire, the
French section of the Fourth International and Socialist Action's sister
organization.
Socialist Action /September 2002 |