The environment continues to be one of the victims of the economic globalization policies identified in the previous section. Shiva is very explicit about her views on globalization and its impact on the environment.
Globalization therefore creates poverty instead of removing it. The new globalization policies have accelerated and expanded environmental degradation and displaced millions of people from their homes and their sustenance base.46 44 Hines, p. 169. 45 Anton, p. 18. 46
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Janet Bruin observed that
… for years, scientists have been warning of the harmful consequences of unlimited economic growth on the earth, the seas, the air, our water and food supply, and the fragile ecosystem that nurtures our planet and its inhabitants. Some believe that a point of no return has been reached. If policies continue with their dictate to produce, export in ways that strain the earth’s capacity to recover, privatize, liberalize and deregulate, environmental deterioration will accelerate.47
Aside from the direct environmental effects of the poor people being forced to make a living – “often simply to survive”48 – at the expense of the environment, Anton cites how liberalization and deregulation have resulted in a “global restructuring of production.”49 In particular he illustrates the growing contribution of the transfer to developing countries of industries or processes with a greater potential for environmental degradation. This transfer is done primarily to access cheaper labor and to escape tougher environmental laws in more developed nations. Michael Doyle and Rachel Massey50 agree that these restructuring may result in sacrificing environmental standards, in particular for firms that have the option to relocate their operations.
An example of this is the establishment through Japanese Official Development Aid (ODA) of the necessary infrastructure, such as first-class roads, a geothermal power station, a large-capacity port, for the establishment of the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corporation (PASAR), a copper smelter in Leyte.51
47 Bruin, p. 11. PASAR 48 Anton, p. 17. 49 Anton, p. 27. 50
Michael Doyle and Rachel Massey, “ Intergovernmental organizations and the environment: Looking towards the future” in Pamela Chasek (ed), The global environment in the twenty-first century: prospects for international cooperation (Tokyo: United Nations University, 2000), pp. 411- 426.
51
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features in one of the cases involved in the development of CEC’s grassroots environmental education curriculum.
Not only are toxic and polluting industries being moved to developing countries, but also this economic paradigm has made toxic waste a commodity. According to Shiva, trade in toxic waste has grown in countries like India where both the processing and disposal costs, and the economic and political clout to resist, are the lowest.
Furthermore, specific GATT-WTO agreements such as the Agreement on Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP) provide an example of how biopiracy has become legitimate. Biopiracy is
… the process through which the rights of indigenous cultures to these resources and knowledge are erased and replaced by monopoly rights for those who have exploited indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.52
Shiva explains how TRIP protects the “formal innovators” (scientists, plant breeders and technologists) who modify the traditional knowledge of the “informal innovators” (farmers, indigenous medical practitioners and forest dwellers) and seek patents for these minor modifications and claim this knowledge as their private property. This situation is an example of how economic globalization policies have contributed to not just to making local people materially poor but has intellectually and culturally deprived them as well.
In the Philippines, Perlas gives another example of the extent of the power of the GATT-WTO policies over local sustainable agriculture programs that aim to stop using pesticides. He described how under GATT new standards on the allowable amount of pesticide residues in imported agricultural products indicate an increase from 300 – 5000 percent over the current US Standard. Furthermore, an agreement called
52
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… the Technical Barriers to Trade construes pesticide-free labeling as discriminatory and a technical barrier to trade. [And] the Agreement on Agriculture rewards agricultural intensification that is based on massive pesticide and chemical inputs.53
To further examine the impact of economic globalization on the Philippine environment, one only needs to study the policies designed under the Medium Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP), which set into motion President Ramos’ vision of Philippine 2000. Specifically for agriculture, the Medium Term Agricultural Development Plan (MTADP) provided the policy framework needed to accelerate the deregulation of the agricultural sector by
… reducing by more than half the land currently used to cultivate corn and rice, and converting freed-up land for diversification to livestock and commercial crops.54
Urag describes how this resulted in the government converting large tracts of agricultural land previously committed to rice and corn production to cut flowers, cash crops and livestock production. These areas were designated as key production areas, which will produce these high value crops for exports.55
However, the government-led land conversion has unfortunately also resulted in the indiscriminate conversion of large tracts of prime agricultural land to export products, further threatening food security. There has been massive conversion of agricultural lands into non-agricultural purposes such as golf courses, residential subdivisions and industrial zones, which themselves have their own associated environmental problems. Golf courses damage the local ecology and consume
53
Perlas, CADI Monograph, p. 5.
54
Angelina Briones and Charmaine Ramos, “Market forces and food security: The case of developing Asia” in P. Chasek (ed), The global environment in the twenty-first century: prospects for international cooperation (Tokyo: United Nations University, 2000), p. 238.
55
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massive amounts of water for the benefit of a few; mostly foreign players who can afford to enter these facilities.
The reduction in rice production, the staple food in the Philippines, will be made up through the importation of a predetermined quantity that increases annually until such time when the quantitative trade restrictions are removed. In addition to rice importation, the government has developed policies that have allowed the importation of agricultural products, which previously were sufficiently produced in the country such as onion, potato, garlic and cabbage. Urag concludes that three years after the launch of Philippines 2000, the supposed beneficiaries of the MTPDP, such as the farmers, have yet to see a substantive improvement in their lives. However, what is clear is that “the exploitation and destruction of the Philippine environment in pursuit of more profit continues.”56
Despite the concerns regarding the detrimental impact of economic globalization on the environment, these are not considered to be global environmental problems as defined by the global institutions like the World Bank. The four global environmental problems identified by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) confirm this observation. The GEF was established by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and UNEP in 1991
… as a financial mechanism that provides grant and concessionary funding to recipient countries for projects and activities that address climate change, biological diversity, international waters, and depletion of the ozone layer.57
Three of the four environmental problems identified, except biological diversity, can be considered to be within the realm of what is often referred to as the global commons or
56
Urag, p. 13.
57
Mikiyasu Nakayama, “The World Bank’s environmental agenda” in P. Chasek (ed), The global environment in the twenty-first century: prospects for international cooperation, (Tokyo: United Nations University, 2000), p. 403.
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… those elements of the global ecosystem that are simultaneously used, experienced and shared by all and are under the effective jurisdiction or sovereignty of no one.58
On the other hand, the loss of biological diversity although often localized to specific areas is global because “extinction can be argued to have a moral, aesthetic and economic consequence for the entire planet.”59 Held and others further argue that within international law, “species diversity and biodiversity constitute part of the ‘common heritage of mankind’.”60
While these four global problems are significant environmental problems, Sussana Davies and Melissa Leach61 observe that seldom are these problems discussed in the context of local livelihoods. They note that in contrast, “global environmental concerns are often discussed in terms of interdependence and the need for north/south cooperation to resolve common threats.”62 These discussions create the notion that only global environmental problems exist, and therefore, the solutions also need to be global, often at the expense of the interests of the local people.
The tendency to construct the global from the perspective alone of global institutions, according to Shiva63
58
Held and others, p. 378.
greatly narrows the scope of the global environmental agenda. She argues that this construction of the global has resulted in the local being marginalized from environmental concerns. She specifically identified as examples the nuclear and chemical industries, which operate globally. While the problems they generate may seem locally confined, such as the use of pesticides in agriculture, she
59
Held and others, p. 379.
60
Held and others, p. 379.
61
Sussana Davies and Melissa Leach, “Globalism versus villagism: National and international issues in food security and the environment”, IDS Bulletin, vol. 22, no. 3 (1991), pp. 43-50.
62
Davies and Leach, p. 43.
63
Vandana Shiva “The Greening of the Global Reach” in Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler (eds), Global visions: beyond the new world order (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993), pp. 53 - 60.
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argues that these environmental problems are very much related to the global scope and reach of these companies.
These chemicals, such as pesticides may not qualify as examples of transboundary pollution because they are not technically pollutants that are transmitted
… through the media of air, soil and water from their point of generation or creation across political borders so that their environmentally degrading impact occurs in other legal jurisdictions.64
The most often cited examples of transboundary pollution are acid rain and the risks of nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl. However, Held and others argue, “there is a need to examine transboundary movement of pollutants that are the immediate, intended and often legal result of economic exchange and production.” 65They give as an example the trade of hazardous wastes and the relocation of pollutive industries, which are examples of what have been facilitated by deregulation and liberalization of trade.
However, despite the intentions of the GEF to address these global environmental problems, Mikiyasu Nakayama concludes, based on his study of the environmental projects funded by the World Bank in 1997 that “issues which can only be solved with a regional collaborative initiative have not yet been adequately addressed.”66 His observation comes from the absence of a mechanism to deal with loans involving more than one country. This mechanism is what is required in dealing with global or at least transboundary environmental problems. Clearly, while global institutions are attempting to identify and address these global problems, there is an absence of an effective mechanism to do so.
64
Held and others, p. 379.
65
Held and others, p. 380.
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Shiva calls for the democratization of these global institutions, not by letting locals sit in global institutions but by these institutions bending down to the locals.67 She identified five implications of this construction of global environmental problems to local communities, particularly in the less developed countries. These are,
(i) the cooption of the language of dissent;
(ii) perpetuation of a false causality, such as poverty causes environmental problems;
(iii) a view that environmental problems are technical problems needing technical solutions and foreign aid;
(iv) that the local needs to sacrifice for the benefit of the global; and (v) that relationships between the powerful ‘global’ and the local are not
reflexive, the powerful can demand from the locals but the reverse is not acceptable.68
The implications that are relevant to the thesis are examined in the course of analyzing CEC’s own construction of the local and the global in its practice of grassroots environmental education.