One result of the failure of the Rio Earth Summit may well be an increase in international terrorism, as young people world-wide decide that the present system is threatening to abolish their future. A prominent European ecologist tells me that he spends much of his time trying to persuade frustrated young people that violence is not the answer. Efforts to fight state terrorism by sanctions against Libya appear the height of hypocrisy to those who remember that the French government agents responsible for the fatal blowing up of the Greenpeace bat were promoted and decorated. Gulf War During the Gulf was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer declared that, whatever the state of the economy, whatever the pressure on public expenditure, Britain would find the money to join the war. No such high-level unconditional commitments to saving the planet’s life-support systems have been forthcoming-in the UK or elsewhere. On the contrary, even an ecological tax reform is regarded as acceptable only if it does not upset current competitiveness, tax income, EC harmonisation plans etc. EC-regulations on bidding for public contracts states that price, customer service, delivery time and even aesthetics may be taken into account when comparing bids - but make no mention of environmental standards. The EC court has decided that waste disposal regulations must not bloc trade. In its partial rejection of the Danish law demanding returnable drink containers, the court concluded that “There has to be a balancing of interests between the free movement of goods and environmental protection, even if in achieving the balance the high standard of protection sought has to be reduced.” The EC’s rush to “deregulate” and slowness to raise standards may yet be its downfall as environmental conflicts multiply. While in 1950 the rich had ten times the per capita buying power of the poor, today they have thirty times as much. The issue is not how the poor can imitate the non-sustainable consumption levels of the rich - which must change - but how “Sustainable Livelihood Security” (Robert Chambers, “The Greening of Aid”) for all can be achieved. Yet the present global agenda is very different. While UNCED produced mainly forms of appeasement (to use Al Gore’s term), the GATTUruguay round is revising the rules of the global economy for decades to come. GATT has no message for the environment. Its objective is to increase world trade by breaking down “restrictions”, putting nations with stricter environmental standards at a commercial disadvantage. Both development and environmental policies run the risk of being declared illegal by GATT. Indeed, the GATT Director General warned in Bangkok that GATT could challenge international environmental accords as well as stricter national rules. Yet, as Nobel-prize-winning economist Trygve Haavelmo and his colleague Stein Hansen have noted “The structure of trade... is a curse from the perspective of sustainable development... Much Northern growth is based on depleting Southern resources for a price far below the cost of sustainable exploitation”. (in Goodland, Daly & El Serafy, “Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development”, World Bank, 1991). Current Round The current GATT round aims at creating a powerful new global institution, the MTO (Multilateral Trade Organisation). Unlike the original 1947 GATT proposal for an International Trade Organisation the MTO proposal makes no provision for addressing the international commodity crisis, controlling restrictive business practices or protecting labour rights, let along protection of the environment or fair trade rules for the poor. According to the draft final text the MTO “shall enjoy in the territories of each of the Members such legal capacity, privileges and immunities as may be necessary for the exercise of it functions”. Member states are required to “take all necessary steps, where changes to domestic laws will be required to implement the provisions..... to ensure conformity of their laws to these agreements”. The stage is set for a global environmental deregulation and standards-lowering competition to attract capital in a world order planned by trans-national corporations. Yet neither democracy nor the market economy will have the credibility to survive an environmental breakdown. The most likely short-term reaction will be “eco-fascism”, i.e. an attempt by well-off minorities to protect heir privileged access to environmental resources. This will not work, as there is no way of completely excluding the poor from the global environment. An “eco-Stalinist” revolution is likely to follow introducing a dictatorship with strict rationing of resources. Social Behaviour Those concerned with the environmental crisis have preferred to avoid the institutional issue, hoping that existing institutions could be pressured to perform tasks diametrically opposed to those for which they were created. A recent OECD paper pointed to the difficulties of promoting eco-taxes in an organisation set up to persuade members that taxes should not be used to change social behaviour. Those who have been trained to believe that ecology is just a subdiscipline of economics are hardly suitable guides into a world order where the economy has to be seen - if we are to survive - as a subset of the global ecosystem. “Lacking an understanding of the carrying capacity of ecological systems, economic planners are unable to relate demand levels to the health of the natural world” (Worldwatch Institute). Indeed World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers - who has described the Third World as “vastly under-polluted” - still believes that “There are no.... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to in any time in the foreseeable future.... The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” (The Guardian, 22,5,92). q
(Extract from “Saving the planet’s life-support systems” |
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