NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8641

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Subject: Mexico-Environment pt.3
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DOCUMENT PART 3
                A global framework for the environmental crisis

      When the world's bankers met in Bangkok in 1991, they faced the
environmental crisis head on. The annual meetings of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund provided ample opportunity for this elite to get a
small taste of the manifestations of the crisis: in the short distance from
the hotels to the convention center, they were trapped in their air-
conditioned limousines, unwilling to attempt the three kilometer journey on
foot for fear of asphyxiation.

      The environmental crisis is very serious and profound. I agree with the
optimists that one of the great contributions of this discussion is that
people are talking about it more. Ten years ago, it would have been difficult
to even gather audiences together. The problem is that we can no longer afford
to continue to talk about the crisis as if it were simply a problem of
recycling. It is no longer sufficient to discuss the notion of responsible
consumption. Can we achieve goals already attained elsewhere? Do we demand, as
Germany now requires, that your refrigerator sales outlet take back the carton
in which the machine was shipped, or that the automobile company receive your
used car after the crash or once it is no longer useful? Is this a responsible
way to discuss the environmental problem?

      Can we talk about the environmental problem as long as it will be
impossible for 5 to 6 billion people on earth to ever enjoy an acceptable
nutritional standard of living? Around the world today, poor people are
producing more than even before. There is no doubt that agricultural
productivity is up; but many are producing more for export, either to the
wealthier areas in their own countries, or more frequently, to the wealthy
consuming nations abroad. Their own standards of living are declining, even as
their incomes are rising. What will happen, five years from now, when the farm
interests in the US and Europe no longer is able to extract the huge subsidies
they presently receive to produce bumper grain crops? Will grain prices rise
three-fold in the next period, as happened to milk prices during the 1985-1990
period, when subsidies were withdrawn? Even as the prospect for rapid rises in
grain prices becomes greater, food producers throughout the third world are
being forced from their farms, their social structures are disintegrating;
others are being transformed into export producers and their lands being
sterilized with intensive monocropping farming techniques that leach the land
of its vitality. Once this process is complete, will their governments, or
those of the wealthy nations, continue to sell them inexpensive grains? But to
maintain lower food prices, taxes will have to rise, and the poor cannot
afford that; will there be the bread riots, like those of Cairo, of Dakar, or
Venezuela, to not mention those which are not quite as spectacular as in
Bangkok.

      I would like to submit that the origin of the world environmental crisis
can be found in the programs of World Bank and in the life styles of the
affluent. However good you feel about recycling, you must first ask why is it
that you have so much to recycle? Why are you permitted to consume so much?
Should there not be some mechanism which limits your consumption to some
responsible level? How much oil, how much energy should people be permitted to
use, as individuals, as members of a wealthy society?
      What volume of unrenewable natural resources is necessary to assure the
success of World Bank projects in poorer countries? Who will benefit from
these projects? Why is it that the message of development pundits is that the
way to achieve the good live is to consume more energy? Those of us that do
not consume as much energy, are underdeveloped. These admonitions are not
personal attacks, they are observations about people in the developed
countries collectively, and as individuals living in those societies.

      These are really hard questions. These issues are at the heart of the
reason why I claim that the environmental problem is fundamentally
irresolvable in Mexico. They are the kinds of questions which an authoritarian
system, run by and for the wealthy, is unwilling and unable to confront. In a
democracy like the United States (if the concept applies there), these are
difficult questions which have not been satisfactorily resolved. There is some
hope that the interests of a very small minority of people does not always
prevail in all parts of the system. But the fundamental questions of the way
in which the environmental problems are generated is not yet a basic part of
the agenda in the USA. I would like to suggest, and one of the messages I
would like to leave you with, is that the global environmental problem is much
more serious than the muck in Mexico City's air.

      It is a very profound question about the model of consumption and
therefore the model of development which advanced industrial capitalism is
creating as the model for world survival. We are told that Mexico has been
successful, because it grew at four per cent last year by producing more than
900,000 vehicles. And yet we did that with a subsidy from Mexico's poor people
who are living worse off than ever before.

      The problem of thinking about the global environmental problem is
embedded in the question: why were more than one-half of Mexico's tropical
rainforests cut down? Was it because the Mexicans wanted the valuable wood
from the trees that were felled? No, a tragic facet of this history is that
when they cut down the precious mahogany, they did not even turn them into
beautiful pieces of furniture; they cut them down to rot on the ground so that
"the cattle could eat the forest". And now Mexicans do not even have the
income to buy the meat: per capita consumption of beef has declined by 71%.
The inventory of hogs is down by more than 60% and back-yard hog raising has
virtually disappeared because of the market and technological changes which
makes it virtually impossible for small-scale producers to survive.

      What is it about society? Where do we look for answers? The Free Trade
Agreement is touted as a magic solution. More automobiles to be produced. We
are told that the American automobile industry is in trouble; but the Mexican
automobile industry has still not sustained any decline in output this year
~do you think that some of the US production has been shifted to Mexico? And
why? The explanation is not that it is simply cheaper to produce an automobile
in Mexico than in the USA: labor as a part of total automobile production
costs is less than 15%; that is something which hardly every gets brought up
in the discussions. Why is it that if labor costs are so small in the total
picture, that 300,000 cars are produced for export in Mexico. Might it have to
do with the fact that the Mexican government has been unable to strictly
enforce its environmental regulations; or might it be related to the fact that
Mexican unions are somewhat less militant than their American counterparts?
Perhaps it might also be related to the structure of the Mexican fiscal
system: taxpayers in Mexico are very generous with regard to the cost of
energy used in automobile plants; we also provide generous subsidies for
housing for Ford employees, including 'low-cost' housing, for their new plant
in Hermosillo. It is not simply a question of low labor costs; rather it is a
more profound question of the extraordinarily complex political relationships
in North America.

      The Free Trade Area is part of a larger program to transform the third
world into a service club for the rich. As part of this effort, the
maquiladora industry will expand to create new jobs, so that Mexico can be
part of this brave new world. And I certainly hope that it creates new jobs;
but I am not very optimistic that the numbers of new jobs created will do
anything to compensate for the several millon jobs that will be lost in food
production over the next few years. But, free trade is really about profits
for corporations rather than the quality of life for people. Up to now, these
two do not go hand in hand.


                             What is the solution?

      I work in an Ecodevelopment Center, founded almost 20 years ago. We
study the relationship between development and the environment. What are the
solutions we examine there? When contemplating the dilemmas of Mexico City, I
have sometimes said that the only solution is a massive flood; some say that
this is heartless. I think that the only kinds of solutions which are viable
are those which redress the balance between rural and urban areas. In one way
or another, this involves the need to repopulate the rural world. I do not see
any solution for urban survival within the kind of model which actually exists
in Mexico or in most other countries.

      When I talk about rural areas, I talk about rescuing the ability of
people who have lived there for centuries, so that they can continue their
thankless task of saving the world FROM humanity. One of the things that we
learn, as we work in Mexico, is that the people who live there ~those so-
called inefficient farmers~ developed extraordinarily complex technologies to
produce the basic goods which humanity has needed and also produce the
services which the earth needs in order to resist humanity. It is
extraordinary to learn about the vast variety of products that are produced in
a traditional Mexican corn field. There are more than fifty useful products
which people use in their daily existence harvested from the "milpa" or corn
field; in a modern corn field, usually only one product is produced: corn to
be consumed by animals, and incidently by the Mexican people.

      What can we do, in the face of the onslaught against the rural
communities? What responses can we offer to Mexican farmers in order to help
them make sense out of producing corn, because in the current world market you
cannot make money producing corn in a traditional system? The best answer, it
seems to me, is to find ways to help them diversify their production in such a
way that their traditional means of food production become an auxiliary
activity; to find some other type of production or paid employment that offers
greater income, because food production will not allow them to live! That is
the extraordinary sadness of the existing organization of the world system:
for many traditional food producers, food production is not viable, is not a
solution for their own survival.

      In our Center, one of the responses is to work with individual
communities and regional groups to identify small projects which would help
them to interact with the resources they have in as creative and productive a
way as possible. I am playing with ideas like working with groups who can
contribute to the task of protecting endangered species as a way of generating
incomes in traditional food producing communities to continue this very
important task. The two species with which I am working right now are located
in the region in which we have concentrated our studies: the Monarch butterfly
and the marine turtle.

      We also happen to have in a nearby community with an important
commercial farming population, an abandoned "geyser" in its midst which is
poisoning its lands with the brine. In this case, we are thinking about what
is necessary to transform this "nuisance" into some productive. It seems odd
to even consider the notion of an abandoned "geyser" ~a Mexican "Old Faithful"
which was never harnessed. It was created by the National Electricity
Commission (CFE) in its search for exploitable geothermal resources; but the
engineers did not consider it important enough to harness for electricity
generation (they do not consider sources which have a potential of less than
20 megawatts of power), so for more than a quarter century it was simply
cordoned off and left to contaminate the land as the sulphurous brine which it
spurts out make the nearby lands unsuitable for cultivation. We are now
developing a project in which the community might participate directly, to
transform the site into a tourist attraction, a spa, a training area for
sporting activities, and even a museum for alternative energy sources. This is
a complex activity, because we not only have to work with the community in
developing such a proposal and determine its feasibility, but we also have to
convince the CFE to admit that it has abandoned the geyser, but then to give
the land back to the community that it took it from in the first place.

      These are examples of the way in which the Ecodevelopment Center is
looking a different ways in which people can begin to use the natural
resources at hand to protect not only the resources themselves but the very
economic viability and social integrity of communities whose very existence is
in question right now. The three examples cited above are only that: examples
of approaches which we think will encourage others to look for different
projects with the same goal: to diversify the productive base so that rural
communities can continue to exist, even to thrive, and to continue to produce
food, as part of a broader strategy for rural development. This strategy draws
part of its inspiration from the need to protect the rich heritage of natural
diversity which is so important in Mexico, with strategies which also
encourage the preservation of the extraordinary reserve of cultural diversity
which has managed to survive in spite of the systematic attack to which it has
been subjected during the past centuries (see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's
important book on this subject with regard to Mexico (1987), and Eric Wolf's
different approach (1982) to the problem of the role of cultural diversity in
world development and the threats which the internationalization of the
economy represents for both nature and people.)

      These projects offer a ray of optimism in the midst of a bleak picture
of the impact of world development on people and the environment in which we
live. They offer a little light, but they cannot change the underlying
dynamic.

      The basic problem is much more serious and cannot be faced with such
small-scale responses. It is the philosophical problem, the basic strategic
problem of determining how to deal with the relationship between us and the
world we live in. It sounds real simple, but as I teach courses and deal with
people on the problems of the environment and natural resources use, the same
fundamental dilemmas and conflicts arise: What promotes economic growth and
who is going to pay for it? Which are the groups that are going to be the
beneficiaries? In the ultimate analysis, it is almost always the case that is
nature which pays the highest tax.


                               The Earth Summit

      Let me end, by reflecting on the Earth Summit. I am very troubled by Rio
'92. I would also like to trouble you. Rio '92 is turning into an exercise
about "How do we make the South more responsive?" How can WE (in the North)
get the South to be better prepared to husband its resources, the resources of
Spaceship Earth, OUR resources, the resources of HUMANITY? This is the same
discussion we had in 1985 in the FAO about germplasm, a little less
spectacular, but equally important. Germplasm is the heritage and the property
of humanity, but biotechnology belongs to the corporation. Why is that?
~Biotechnology does not work without germplasm. Germplasm does not belong to
Mexico simply because it is one of seven center of megabiodiversity worldwide.
It belongs to humanity and Mexico has a responsibility to protect this
biodiversity in the name of humanity, but Monsanto or Genetec get the profits
from its exploitation. Mexico does not even get the technology, unless we
reinvent it ourselves or buy the patent. What is a responsible role for
Mexico? How might the benefits from the exploitation of germplasm guarantee
the efforts to assure the survival of centers of diversity which are presently
threatened by the global trend towards productive specialization, a trend
which is advancing particularly rapidly in Mexico.

      The same dynamic and the same conflicts are present in the preparatory
meetings for the Earth Summit. It is very troubling. I am troubled by the
notion that environmental responsibility has to do with saving the Brazilian
rainforest, and paying a good price for some sort of nut that come from some
sort of tree that comes from some sort of indian to eat in your ice cream.
This is very troubling. Should the Earth Summit not be about the amount of
energy and way in which that energy is used to heat homes in the USA, to move
people, and even the way in which individuals can decide ON THEIR OWN how much
energy to consume? Should the Earth Summit not be about the retooling of the
aerospace industry in Los Angeles? I think Reagan was wrong about cutting off
New York from the USA, letting it float out to sea; perhaps it should be
California that should be cut off; at least in NY, there is an extensive
public transport system and public debates among community groups about
recycling and even reorganization of local productive systems. California
prides itself on having one of the ideal climates of the world, and yet its
per capita use of energy is also one of the highest on earth. How is that?

      Do we really need a bullet train between LA and Las Vegas? I guess that
this will reduce fuel consumption, if we compare it to the same number of
people traveling by air, but maybe even not. It will reduce congestion at LA
international airport, and perhaps on the freeways, but it will not even help
support other trains, since each line will be privately and separately owned,
not conceived as a system in which profitable routes support other socially
necessary but less profitable ones.

      Let me end, then, by asking:

            What is the Earth Summit about?
            Why is it that we in the South are the irresponsible ones?


                             BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

      For a broader discussion of the issues raised in this paper, the reader
might find my book, Distorted Development: Mexico in the world economy
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), offers a useful introduction to the country's
development model and some of its environmental problems. An analysis of
Mexican environmental NGOs can be found in E. Kurzinger, et. al., Pol!tica
Ambiental en Mxico: El papel de las organizaciones no-gubernamentales
(Mexico: Fundaci"n Friedrich Ebert, 1991).

      The Brundtland Report is officially authored by the World Commission on
Environment and Development, Our Common Future, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987).

      For a discussion of environmental problems and the process of world
integration, I recommend the issues raised in various documents of the Swiss
office of the World Wide Fund for Nature, prepared by its policy analyst,
Charles Arden-Clarke; two recent documents are: "South-North Terms of Trade,
Environmental Protection, and Sustainable Development" and  The General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Environmental Protection and Sustainable
Development". The special issue of Latin American Perspectives (1992) on
environmental problems is also of interest; see the articles by Goldrich and
Mumme.

      Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's engaging and sensitive discussion of Mexico's
indigenous population and its role in modern society is entitled: Mexico
Profundo (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987). Eric Wolf's masterful synthesis of an
enormous body of anthropological literature on the impact of capitalist
expansion on local societies throughout the world can be found in Europe and
the People without History, (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).