|
Patrick Bond
September 9, 2002
Officials of the United Nations and the host South African
government looking hard in the mirror this weekend will
have to judge the World Summit on Sustainable Development
(WSSD) a failure. The only remarkable step forward for
human and environmental progress taken in the ultra-bourgeois
Johannesburg suburb of Sandton was the widespread adoption
of the idea of "global apartheid," at President Thabo
Mbeki's suggestion.
Anyone contemplating this phrase immediately identifies
not a natural condition of rational economic relationships,
but instead a structured system of oppression. How else
do the globe's winners advance, if not because of the
economic and political chains holding down the poor, the
women, the people with darker skins?
The chains of global apartheid are unaccountable institutions,
which came under intense criticism over the past two weeks:
the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, International
Monetary Fund, and multinational corporations. Because
of the power these undemocratic institutions wield, most
WSSD plans to address poverty and ecological degradation
will actually amplify the world's problems.
Vandana Shiva described the outcome simply: "What happened
in Johannesburg amounts to a privatization of the Earth,
an auction house in which the rights of the poor were
given away." Friends of the Earth cited backsliding on
the Convention on Biological Diversity. Complained the
NGO Energy and Climate Caucus, "The agreement on energy
is an outright disaster, with the dropping of all targets
and timetables." The Gaia Foundation called the final
summit document "an incredibly weak agreement." Australian
Green Party senator Bob Brown concluded, "like ostriches,
the wealthy nations have stuck their heads into the sand
and have let down the next generation in an appalling
way." Even the establishment NGO Oxfam called the WSSD
"a triumph for greed and self-interest, a tragedy for
the poor and environment."
In the five key fields of water, energy, healthcare,
agriculture, and biodiversity, the Geneva-based WTO considers
essential state services to be, simply, typical commodities.
Pushed hardest by the European Union and U.S., the WTO's
General Agreement on Trade in Services aims to open up
South African and all Third World markets for penetration
by privatizing firms.
Those firms' record in South Africa and elsewhere has
been abysmal, and in the case of the Paris-based Suez
water company, which runs Johannesburg's system, the ongoing
refusal to install humane sanitation systems is already
contributing to dangerously high counts of the deadly
E.Coli bacteria, even in the Sandton water table. And
in its main South African pilot project, Nkonkobe, Suez
was thrown out by the mayor last year for failing to serve
the poor: the hated bucket system--in which excrement
is physically collected in unsanitary small pails by municipal
workers each morning--is still in place eight years after
Suez took over the town's water provision.
Yet the WSSD continued to promote Public-Private (or
"Type 2") Partnerships as a privatized replacement for
intergovernmental agreements and actions. Meaningful environmental
agreements have been scarce since the 1992 Earth Summit
in Rio, and global elites appear to have given up on each
other. Veteran bureaucrat Kofi Annan, who since Rio has
permitted an unprecedented transnational corporate takeover
of the United Nations through the so-called Global Compact,
advanced the argument that if poor countries are more
open to trade of this sort, the poor will benefit.
This is a misperception also advanced strongly in Pretoria,
especially by trade and industry minister Alec Erwin.
In May, the main official in South Africa's environment
ministry and local manager of the WSSD, Chippy Olver,
confirmed to me that removing European agricultural subsidies
was South Africa's main goal for the WSSD. Aside from
yet another non-binding political declaration to lower
subsidies, no progress can be reported.
But what if a breakthrough had occurred? Would the strategy
of allowing further corporate domination of our economies,
for the sake of free trade, eventually trickle benefits
down to the poor? Critics argue that, to the contrary,
increasing globalization is the core reason for growing
poverty, inequality, and environmental damage.
We can illustrate with an example that many of us enjoy
every morning: a cup of coffee. When South Africa became
free in 1994, the world market price of coffee was $1.82
a pound. Today, it's just $0.47, for the simple reason
that all Third World countries have been pushed by the
WTO, IMF, and World Bank to export more, particularly
so as to repay debt often inherited from previous dictatorial
regimes.
The coffee price at the supermarket has not come down,
however, nor have the profits enjoyed by the main packagers
and distributors--Proctor&Gamble, Philip Morris, Sara
Lee, and Nestle--which control 40% of the world market.
These middle-men rake off 85% of the $55 billion in annual
world sales. Misery for coffee workers has increased,
with a recent International Migration Organization study
recording that 70% of Guatamalan coffee sector workers
intend to migrate to the U.S.--illegally--because of the
price crash.
Competition amongst the lowest-paid people in the world
is intensifying. At the very bottom, Vietnam raised its
share of world coffee output from 1.2% to 12.3% during
the 1990s. Huge areas of tropical forest required by humanity
and nature for the sake of biodiversity have been sacrificed
so wretched Third World countries can export coffee and
similar products, mainly so as to service foreign debt.
The Third World's tendency to overproduce, thus flooding
markets and driving down prices of cash crops and minerals,
is the main structural feature of world trade. Repaying
the debt is the main catalyst. The WTO, IMF, and World
Bank are the guiding forces. Multinational corporations
are the main beneficiaries. Low-income people and the
environment are the victims. This is global apartheid.
Ending European and U.S. agricultural subsidies will
do nothing substantial to change the structural features
of global apartheid, unfortunately. Last week, even Bank
economist Branko Milanovic admitted that 1990s trade liberalization
by countries with incomes of less than $5,000 per person
per year (including South Africa) increased internal inequality.
According to Milanovic, "at very low average income level,
it is the rich who benefit from openness. It seems that
openness makes income distribution worse before making
it better."
On the civil society front, the WSSD's other important
feature was the global-local linkage of protests against
privatization and services disconnections, landlessness,
and many other neoliberal development policies that Pretoria
has adopted since 1994, partly at the behest of the World
Bank. August 31 was the major day for protest. In contrast
to the smaller (5,000-person) rally addressed by Mbeki,
the unprecedented 7-mile march of 20,000 local and international
activists from the impoverished Alexandra township to
Sandton, against both the WSSD and government, showed
the depth of popular anger.
Total disrespect was shown by workers, the unemployed,
and the rural poor for Mbeki's envoy, minister Essop Pahad,
who was denied by acclaim the opportunity to address the
protest rally. The same sentiment emerged against U.S.
secretary of state Colin Powell at the Summit's final
session on Wednesday, led by progressive U.S. NGOs and
joined by delegates from most countries: "Bush, Shame,
Bush, Shame!" The hearty heckling of Powell comes on the
eve of a U.S. attack against Iraq, and reflects frustration
at countless other infringements of international agreements
on environment and development.
Both locally in South Africa and globally, critics say,
the ruling elites remain intent not on breaking the chains
of global apartheid, but on polishing them.
(Patrick Bond is a professor at the
University of the Witwatersrand and author of Against
Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF
and International Finance (University of Cape Town Press,
2001) and Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development
and Social Protest (Africa World Press, 2002).)
Source: http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0209postwssd.html
9.
Back...
|
