Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (23 page)
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Authors: Kerryn Higgs
Tags: #Environmental Economics, #Econometrics, #Environmental Science, #Environmental Policy
The Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)—known as the Earth Summit—took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Intended as a conference to move the conclusions of the Brundtland Commission into the practical sphere, it planned to address such pressing environmental concerns as species loss, depletion of energy resources, global warming, and the looming water crisis; its various statements, such as
Agenda 21
, spoke of sustainable development as if it were the most crucial priority. But even as UN agencies moved to incorporate concepts of ecological sustainability and equity into their approach to development, the neoliberal program was already sweeping the world.
The Earth Summit has been characterized by the development analysts Neil Middleton, Phil O’Keefe, and Sam Moyo as leaving the poor behind while addressing the first world’s obsession with environmental decline.
8
But a close reading of its two general texts,
Agenda 21
and
The Rio Declaration
,
9
suggests that the diplomats who signed them had by this time accepted the market as the answer to decades of failure on poverty and were handing
both
equity
and
environment over to a “rising tide” solution. Clearly, after the poor performance of the development era, anything that promised that the first world could hold on to its affluence and still solve the twin problems of equity and ecology was an offer too good to refuse. Consequently, although the introduction to
Agenda 21
spoke of “equity” numerous times and acknowledged that debt, poor commodity prices, and poor terms of trade had made developing countries even poorer, it went on to install global free trade as the central strategy for the key task of “international cooperation to accelerate sustainable development.” The neoliberal code words “optimal” and “efficiency” occurred throughout the document.
The Rio preparations were similar to the IPCC process, where major meetings are preceded by a series of prior negotiations allowing for reports and texts to be worded in such a way as to enable agreement to be reached at the final meeting. According to the Cambridge economist Michael Grubb and colleagues, who wrote an analysis of the Earth Summit, the drafting of
Agenda 21
was a process of “Byzantine complexity,” beset with the “difficulties raised by trying to address the concerns and problems of very disparate countries.” The result was “an ungainly compromise, with specific
caveats
for special concerns and interests.”
10
Several sources indicate that the US negotiators managed to water down key elements, in particular chapter 4, which was intended to acknowledge that the consumption patterns of the rich world were unsustainable, and chapter 16 which dealt with sustainable agriculture and biotechnology.
11
President George H. W. Bush is widely quoted as commenting before the conference that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”
12
First world governments also refused to modify their protection of intellectual property rights: despite much talk of “technology transfer,” nothing in the documents provided for waiver of or discounts on such commercial rights.
Middleton, O’Keefe and Moyo, who argue that Rio shifted “away from development and towards the environment,” are unduly optimistic about the Rio conference actually tackling environmental problems. Their critique of Rio’s failure on equity is, however, quite apt. “We are operating in a political world from which morality has been banished,” they wrote. “In its place … we find simple greed masked by the euphemisms of ‘management’ and ‘efficiency.’”
13
Just as land reform was discarded as an option in the 1950s, here again questions of ownership of land and the distribution of wealth were not permitted to surface. Third world countries had wanted the Rio Declaration to acknowledge “sovereign rights of nations to exploit their own resources … and the right of individuals to have freedom from hunger, poverty and disease”; they also called on the rich to accept the main burden of repairing the environmental damage they had caused. Only hints of these priorities survived the preparatory phases.
Even so, the United States still issued formal objections to several articles in the final draft which it felt gave poor countries too much latitude, including the one that referred to “common but differentiated responsibilities”; this was thought to imply acceptance of obligations and perhaps liabilities, and was rejected.
14
President Bush refused to sign the framework Convention on Biodiversity, despite the repeated protections for intellectual property written into all the Rio documents. US economic interests, narrowly perceived, would not be subordinated, whether to development or equity, sustainability or the environment. Bush, it should be remembered, was not in conflict with the US Senate, which never ratified the Convention on Biodiversity, even after the newly elected President Clinton signed it. The non-negotiable “American way of life” was and remains popular among Americans. The second President Bush declined to sign the Kyoto Protocol on the same grounds: “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.”
15
No reform of the international economic system was envisaged in the Rio documents, though the Brundtland Commission had thought it essential. No changes were recommended to the debt regime or the terms of trade, and the IMF was given the nod to continue imposing “liberalization” in the guise of structural adjustment plans for poor countries in default. Funding for all the programs set out in
Agenda 21
was estimated in the final paragraphs of each chapter, but no mechanisms to raise actual amounts were agreed upon. What was offered was a pledge to try to meet the aid commitment of 0.7 percent of GDP that had been promised since 1970 but never delivered, except occasionally by some Scandinavian countries. The other assistance offered was “technology transfer,” but this can hardly be regarded as generous since it made no commitment beyond commercial exchange at market prices. Aid has never approached the target suggested at Rio (box 8.1), and technology is transferred only to those who can pay. Corporations were not burdened with regulation or even oversight.
Box 8.1
Aid
Popular concepts of aid are beset with misconceptions. Leaving aside both nongovernment aid and emergency aid such as is dispensed for earthquakes and tsunamis (less than 20 percent of aid), the focus here is on official development assistance, which began to emerge in the late 1950s. In line with President Truman’s approach, official aid was initially conceived as technical rather than financial, with military aid available to some countries aligning themselves unambiguously with the United States against the Communist bloc.
a
By the end of the 1950s, however, the usefulness of development aid to the donor countries began to be recognized. The development authority Walt Rostow, in collaboration with ex-CIA man Max Millikan, argued that the needs of the first world for markets and raw materials made development aid a good investment.
b
This sort of aim was described baldly by economist Hollis Chenery: “The main objective of foreign assistance, as of many other tools of foreign policy, is to produce the kind of political and economic environment in the world in which the United States can pursue its own social goals.”
c
Though Chenery’s comments refer to the United States, there is little reason to suppose that other nations’ objectives have been any more altruistic. Such forthright descriptions of the purposes of aid are not common these days, and the purpose is often misunderstood by the populations of the first world, who see aid as giving money away. It is sometimes argued, especially on the political right, that aid should be abolished and the money spent at home.
d
The majority of government-financed aid is not, in any case, dispensed to the poor countries to spend according to their own priorities but is usually paid directly to the rich countries’ own corporations to carry out projects often nominated by these companies. In the case of the United States, for example, about one-third of the 1992 foreign aid budget (some $5 billion) was devoted to grants or loans for purchasing US military equipment.
e
The
Sydney Morning Herald
, reporting on the Australian aid budget of approximately $3 billion in the 2007 tax year, found that “much of the money has never left Australia, and that 10 private companies held almost $1.8 billion in contracts let by the Government’s official aid delivery agency—AusAID.”
f
While Rio recommended that aid be boosted to 0.7 percent of GDP, as originally promised in 1970 and repeated many times since, the volume of aid from the rich to the poor world, as a proportion of their GDP, has actually declined in the past forty years, from 0.51 percent in the late 1960s to approximately 0.3 percent in 2009.
g
Notes
a
Payer 1991, 42.
b
As noted in Payer 1991, 43.
c
Chenery 1964, 81.
d
DeLay cited in Kristof 2006; Joyce cited in Grattan 2010.
e
Hartung 1992.
f
Jopson 2007.
g
Riddell 2009.
Soon after Rio, in 1993, the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations was dissolved and its work on a corporate Code of Conduct was abandoned. Its residual website inside the UN’s Trade portfolio notes that “its work reflected the changing times and became more focused on the positive, rather than the negative, effects of FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] and TNCs.”
16
In 1994, GATT concluded what was known as the Uruguay Round of negotiations, strengthening intellectual property rights, and the WTO came into being with far stricter means of enforcing its trade rules than GATT had ever had (discussed in chapter 13). The liquidation of life on earth has continued unimpeded by Rio and its successor conferences in Johannesburg in 2002 and Rio in 2012.
Sustainable Development: A Dubious Proposition
The kind of development that has transpired since Rio has not reflected principles of sustainability, in the sense of being able to continue a course of action indefinitely without jeopardizing the ecological ground of the enterprise. It is more likely, as some have argued, that the notion is an oxymoron. Herman Daly makes a sharp distinction between sustainable development (qualitative) and sustainable growth (quantitative), which is, in his view, the oxymoron. If development is to be sustainable, Daly believes, it must be “development without growth.”
17
Certainly, the idea that the habits of the affluent can be extended to all of the earth’s seven billion people and rising is fantasy (as exemplified in the discussion of cars and paper in chapter 6), even though the celebration of the swelling “global middle class” apparently envisages such a dream. Wolfgang Sachs asks, aptly:
Is sustainable development supposed to meet the needs for water, land and economic security or the needs for air travel and bank deposits? Is it concerned with survival needs or luxury needs? Are the needs in question those of the global consumer class or those of the enormous numbers of “have-nots”?
18
These are questions that the Brundtland Commission touched on but did not press, and questions that Rio shelved despite its best intentions. It appears that these questions, too, are forbidden under the dominant economic regime. Whether sustainability could have been useful remains an unanswerable question, since the idea has been disabled. As British playwright Jeremy Seabrook put it, “Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear.… Sustainable is what the rich and powerful can get away with.
19
In the next chapter, I turn to what are regarded as great development successes in China and India, where economic growth has risen by more than 7 percent in most years over the past two decades (three in China’s case). I ask whether these transformations have met any criteria of sustainability, and how they have affected the poor and the very poor.
9
Growth and Its Outcomes for the Poor
We all have a responsibility to create the conditions for the poor to be less poor and then to be middle class and beyond.
—Rupert Murdoch, 2008
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If the entire nation of three hundred million people took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.
—Mahatma Gandhi, 1928
China and India are regarded as success stories for economic growth in the developing world over the past twenty to thirty years, but there are disturbing indications that growth has not relieved extreme poverty in India and that the improvements in China are not being shared equitably. In both countries, the pursuit of growth is accompanied by serious environmental damage and the dispossession or forced removal of tens of millions of the poorest people.
Twenty-first Century Enclosure: Tribals, Farmers, and Slums
Dispossession has been part of the transformation of subsistence farming into profit-making agriculture since the earliest British enclosures turned farmland over to sheep grazing. Sir Thomas More in 1516 condemned the “unreasonable covetousness” with which the rich evicted the peasants from their houses and fields and replaced husbandry and tillage with sheep that “eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.”
1
Enclosure today is little different. Already imposed in the development era and intensified in the “free market” phase, it has taken two main forms: a transformation of small-scale subsistence farmland into profit- and export-oriented agriculture (analogous to the European enclosures of past centuries) and direct expropriation of the land of indigenous peoples and peasant farmers (this time carried out by the ruling elites of the postcolonial societies, often in collaboration with Western corporations). The same process occurs on land that is not inhabited by humans, where ecosystems sheltering other species have been relatively unthreatened; these places too are being “enclosed,” logged, or cleared for palm oil or similar plantations. Motives for these dispossessions range from establishing corporate mining operations and agribusiness to setting up industrial complexes and special economic zones (SEZs) or clearing valleys for dam building. The poor and the powerless are routinely losing what land they have (or have access to) across the world, both in countries considered to be in transition to modernity and wealth (such as China and India) and in those still regarded as underdeveloped (such as parts of Latin America and most of Africa).
