Day 284 - 22 Oct 96 - Page 38
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2 MR. MORRIS: Yes. And secondly --
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4 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Well, I thought those were two separate
5 ones.
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7 MR. MORRIS: Yes, they are. Sorry, yes. But, no, sorry the
8 second point I wanted to make. So the first point is they
9 are two separate statements in that text. And the next
10 thing I wanted to say about it is it says that McDonald's
11 and many other corporations are collectively contributing
12 to a major ecological catastrophe. It does not say
13 McDonald's is contributing to a major ecological
14 catastrophe; it says McDonald's and many other corporations
15 are contributing to a major ecological catastrophe,
16 combined. What they are also doing in a combined way is
17 forcing the tribal peoples, et cetera.
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19 If we can also rely.... Sorry, no, the statement about
20 major ecological catastrophe is -- well, I am not sure. In
21 some ways that colonial invasion paragraph also relates to
22 the previous page, although it is under a different
23 heading, because the nature of the economic imperialism is
24 a kind of colonial invasion, and then especially when you
25 consider the last sentence in that last paragraph: This is
26 a typical example of the arrogance and viciousness of
27 multi-national companies in their endless search for more
28 and more profits. And where do we find other examples?
29 We find it in the previous page.
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31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is a third and separate sting then.
32 You have got responsibility or blame for starvation in the
33 third world, destruction of the rainforest or tropical
34 forest, you would say, which is the ecological side, and
35 then you have got this third sting, forcing tribal peoples
36 in the rainforest off their ancestral territories; is that
37 right? It seems to me at moment you can argue that with
38 some strength.
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40 MR. MORRIS: Yes, I think that the eviction of small farmers is
41 a bad thing in itself, whether it results in hunger or not,
42 and therefore if people are being displaced by the cash
43 crop economy, then that is defamatory of McDonald's and is
44 a separate discrete point. That could result in hunger and
45 it could result in destruction of forests as they move into
46 the forest, or indeed moving into slums in shanty towns on
47 the edges of Sao Paulo.
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49 I think that there is a general sting, if that be the right
50 word, in the overall power of multi-national corporations
51 and the US dollar.
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53 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is what I tried to put to you this
54 morning, was it not?
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56 MR. MORRIS: Yes. Was I reluctant to agree? I was not clear
57 about --
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59 MR. JUSTICE BELL: About McDonald's using their power as a
60 multi-national, et cetera to do various things.
