From a Third World perspective, the Greenhouse Effect crisis is caused by the polluting production systems of the industrial countries and their promotion of energy-inefficient industry and agriculture to the Third World. To counter global warming, the North must bear the main burden and end its exploitation of both nature and the South.

When temperatures rose beyond 100 degress Fahrenhelt in many American cities in the summer of 1988, drought and warmer climates were no longer ignored as merely 'local' occurrences in the Third World. Climatic change had become a 'global' problem.

The millions of victims of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa had not been sufficient to mobilise governments and official agencies in the North to respond to desertification and drought as global environmental emergencies. It was left to citizen initiatives such as 'Live Aid from for Africa' to collect relief funds for the dying.

The millions of deaths in dozens of countries did not make the tragedy global, because it took place in the Third World. It remained 'local'.

Thermometers registering a few degrees more ln the United States, however, succeeded in turning climatic change into a 'global' issue for all the govemments of the industrialised North and the entire scientific community was immediately mobilised.

Scientific uncertainty, which had been used as an excuse for inaction on burning problems of the Third World, had suddenly become acceptable in policy making, because the issues now touched the privileged North.

The Northern bias which enabled the Greenhouse Effect and ozone depletion to gain such sudden prominence has continued to dominate the discourse on the global climatic crisls. The identification of problems and solutions are weighed by that bias.

The threat to the atmospheric commons has been building up over the past few centuries as a result of industrial activity, largely in the North, which has been pumping gaseous wastes like carbon dioxide, the chlorofluoro-carbons (CFCs), methane and nitrous oxide, which trap heat and cause the Greenhouse Effect.

The North and South have therefore had a very unequal role in the creation of ecological problems like the Greenhouse Effect. Yet the North is unwilling to take up the extra responsibillty, proportionate to its cumulative contributions, for cleaning up the atmosphere.

Most international meetings and discussions on global warming focus more on projected future contributions to Greenhouse gases by Third World countries, than on past and present contributions by the industrialised North. The Third World, quite naturally, sees discrimination behind this prescription of uniform sharing of the costs, when it has not been an equal partner in generating them.

There is yet a more hidden, but perhaps more dangerous, role played by the industrialised North in contributing to global warming. This is in the aggressive way it has been pushing the Third World on to an energy-intensive path of development.

The fossil-fuel addiction, which has spread from the North to the South in the past few decades through the process of 'development', has a cultural aspect as well as a material aspect.

Culturally, it was assumed that the lack of dependence on fossil fuels was an indicator of a 'backward' and ~primitive~ economy. International development experts and agencies advised Third World govemments to make an energy transition in the fossil-fuel era of 'modernity'.

Renewable sources of energy (and economies based on them) were declared unproductive. A popular text book on development in the 1960 stated about India that: 'Production is achieved through human and animal, rather than mechanical power. Most agriculture is unproductive; human or animal manure may be used, but chemical fertilisers and pestlcides are unknown.'

Proposed as the altemative was an agricultural system that pumps carbon dioxide from diesel-run tractors and pump sets that pumps nitrous oxide from fertilisers in the name of increasing productivity. It was a guaranteed prescription for adding to the Greenhouse Effect.

There was, however, nothing intrinsically productive about an agriculture which used fossil-fuel for energy and fertlliser inputs. While indigenous and traditional food production practices use about half a calorie of clean renewable energy to produce one calorie of food, the fossil fuel-based mechanised and chemical agriculture uses 10 calories of polluting, non-renewable energy to produce one calorie of food.

The tractor and automobile as a symbol of progress, and the plough and bullock cart as a symbol of backwardness was part of the cultural transformation associated with development. The Greenhouse crisis is forcing us to look again at these symbols, through the ecological prism.

It is forcing us to make visible the hidden subsidies and environmental and social costs which allowed unproductive systems to be perceived as productive, and energy waste to be vlewed as an indicator of efficiency and development.

The threat to survival from climatic catastrophe can help shift away from wrongly measuring progress according to energy consumption levels to a more ethical and ecological concept of progress linked to energy conservatlon.

It provides an opportunlty to begin to see the 'Wabenzi' (the Mercedes Benz tribe) as the most primitlve and parasitic of tribes in the Third World, who live off their societies and nature.

But we do not have a calculus of compensation for the damage that has been done to the Thlrd World through expensive and ill-conceived advice from the North which has caused irreversible erosion of energy prudent lifestyles and forced the Third World to follow the North on the path to the Greenhouse crisis.

The shift from energy-prudent to energy-wasteful systems of production in the Third World has been made through cultural as well as economic colonisation. The Northern aid agencies were basically financing their own companies and businesses through aid and development projects in the Third World.

Aid for fertiliser and tractors, for transportation and mega-energy projects was primarily meant to provide the Third World with the foreign exchange to buy machinery, equipment, engineering and other services from the Industrialised countries.

It has been worked out that for every dollar of aid Third World countries receive, three dollars of business is generated for the industrialised countries.

The World Bank gives 25% of all its loan to the energy sector. In India, the Bank plans to double its assistance for power projects from US$500 million per annum to US$1,000 million per year during the current eighth plan period.

The National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), which operates the coal-based superthermal power plants at Singrauli, Farakka, Ramagundam, Talcher, Korba and Chandrapur, is the single largest beneficiary of World Bank assistance. Total World Bank assistance committed to NTPC for power projects is estimated at US$3,867 million.

World Bank loans earn money for the Bank. The World Bank now receives US$1.9 billion more in repayment from the poor countries than it has lent. World Bank lending is intimately tied to these proflts, not to the needs of the Third World.

How does one distribute responsibllity for the creation of Greenhouse gases in these Internationally financed energy projects which also dlsplace millions of people from their homelands? Can we legitimately leave out the role of the international bank loans (with their drive for interest) and industrialised country equipment manufacturers (and their drlve for markets) when we worry about the growth of fossil-fuel consumption in the Third World? How much of this growing energy demand in the Third World is propelled by the proflt imperative of the North?

Tropical deforestation is another aspect, related to climatic change that the Northern powers are using for coerclon of the Third World. But like the expanslon of fossil-fuel energy systems, troplcal deforestation is also driven by the needs of the North to finance capital-intensive projects and to have access to cheap raw materials.

Amazonia is disappearing not because of the local inhabitants but to supply cheap beef to Northem consumers and to supply charcoal for smelting iron for export. Southeast Asia's forests are disappearing to supply tropical hardwood to Japanese and European markets. And as commodity prices fall and debt burdens spiral, the Third World is increasingly trapped in the vicious cycle of exporting more to earn less.

Economic processes that have created growth in the North through trade and aid have, therefore, created underdevelopment and poverty in the South, except for a tiny elite. The spread of capital and energy-intensive development in the Third World was part of the profit imperative of Northern flnance.

The rislng oil prices in the 1970s created capital surplus for Northern banks, and foreign exchange deficits for most Third World countries. Citibank took the lead in lending to the poor as a business opportunity and in 1974 it was earning 40% of its total profits from the Third World, from only 7% of its assets.

The Third World debt is the combined result of unequal economic transactlons including unfair trade and unjust loans. Together, debt-servicing and capital flight have made poor countries net exporters of capital. The poor are paying the rich.

In addition, the poor are being subjected to IMF conditionalities and the World Bank's structural adjustment programmes, to make the impoverished and drained economies adjust to the needs of global finance.

The debt-burden is a major hurdle preventing the Third World to play the conservation role that Third World citizens and the global ecological crisis are demanding. The Northern financial system is centrally responsible for the debt-crisis through pushing bad loans and unjust interest demands on the Third World. As John Kenneth Galbraith has written, 'such loans, given by foolish banks to foolish govemments for foolish purposes - generally are not - and perhaps should not be repaid'.

Whether it is higher levels of fossil fuel use, or faster rates of deforestation in the Third World, the economic processes are more closely tied to the logic of international aid, finance and trade, than to the basic and vital needs of the poor people of the Third World, who are being systematically pushed out of existence.

The process that creates an economic incapacity in the poorer countries is intimately linked with the processes that generate the economic strength of the industrialised North. This inverse relationship, reflected in debt and unequal trade, cannot be maintained in a search for sustainability.

A common future cannot emerge from economic and ecological apartheid. Apartheid must first be removed.

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