FRFI 154 April / May 2000
One million people have been displaced by what is called a ‘natural disaster’ in Mozambique. In Bangladesh in 1998 two thirds of the country was flooded. Hurricane Mitch devastated much of Honduras in the same year. Onissa in India was flooded in 1999 and then coastal Venezuela ruined. Unprecedented storms lashed France last Christmas. Mother Nature is proving very fickle indeed.
The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. 1998 was the worst year ever for storm damage. The German insurance company Munich Re says that the frequency of ‘natural disasters’ has tripled since the 1960s. (See David Nicholson-Lord in New Statesman, 6 March for an excellent summary of the political responses to global warming). Global warming provokes little more remark in the media than blithe comments on an early Spring or improved prospects for English vine growers. The Red Cross estimates that in 1998 ‘natural disasters’ caused 58% of the world’s refugees and that ‘environmental refugees’ exceeded the numbers of people displaced by wars. 32,000 people were killed by natural disasters in 1998, 60,000 in 1999.
Environmentalists are talking of a Nemesis effect: sudden qualitative changes in conditions brought about by crossing critical thresholds. For example, the vast forest fires now burning uncontrollably in Indonesia, sudden changes in ocean currents caused by melting ice caps, the loss of entire fish species and the attendant food chain caused by destruction of coral reefs. Nemesis means retaliation, poetic justice, and punishment – nature avenging the blows inflicted on it by modern capitalism.
When did you hear Tony Blair make a speech on the dangers of global warming? Never! Instead we have Two Jags (and one Rover) Prescott as the role model in charge of transport.
Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries are serious analysts of what is happening in the world; they are not captives of spin-doctors striving to justify a status quo that heaps ruin on so many lives. In 1983 Castro and Cuba published The world economic and social crisis – its impact on the underdeveloped countries, its sombre prospects and the need to struggle if we are to survive. It is the most detailed analysis of almost all the concerns brought to Seattle and the World Trade Organisation 16 years later. Here Castro describes the catastrophe unfolding in the majority of poor nations in the world. The dependence on a few commodities – sugar, tea, copper, tin, bananas, coffee etc – whose prices kept falling and have fallen a further 45% since the book was written. Here is the unpayable, unbearable Third World debt which stood at $70 billion in 1970, $600 billion in 1982 and is now over four times that amount. Here are the multinational corporations that monopolise the world’s markets. Here are the protectionist barriers used by the USA, western Europe and Japan to keep out Third World products.
Castro states: ‘It is necessary to add man’s actions on the environment, which are increasingly causing unprecedented changes in the stability, organisation, balance, interaction and even survival of the Earth’s main ecological systems.’ Here is detailed the deforestation, depletion of water resources, now 60% of what they were in the 1970s, the pollution of the air and seas, the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Here are the giant firms paying Third World workers one tenth of the wages that are paid in the metropolitan heartlands. Here are the 500 million who went to bed hungry each night. Now they are gone, to be replaced by a billion people in hunger today. Here are the monstrous arms expenditures used to keep humanity in this state of affairs. Arms expenditures that year after year benefit British capitalism almost as much as any other country in the world – excepting the USA.
For the 1992 Rio Summit on the environment Fidel Castro submitted ‘Tomorrow is too late – development and the environmental crisis in the Third World’. He states: ‘Stop transferring to the Third World lifestyles and consumer habits that ruin the environment. Make human life more rational. Adopt a more just international economic order. Use science to achieve sustainable development without pollution. Pay the ecological debt instead of the foreign debt. Eradicate hunger and not humanity…Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.’ Castro concludes, ‘Humanity can still stop and reverse the destruction of the environment. It nevertheless seems appropriate to ask how much time it has to do so. If present trends continue, in 40 years the Earth’s population will have doubled, the climate will have suffered deep and irreversible changes, the tropical rain forests will have practically disappeared; immense deserts, sterile and degraded lands will have replaced a large part of the lands that are now used for crops and livestock raising; clean water will be very hard or impossible to find in entire regions; and hunger will spread uncontrollably and irremediably.’
Cuba does not just analyse the world but it acts. Cuba led in the campaign to cancel Third World debt; Cuban volunteers provide more doctors and teachers to the poor nations than any other country in the world and Cuban soldiers broke the teeth of the apartheid South African Defence Force in Angola. Who better to be at Seattle, who better to be with the demonstrators in the streets and the representatives of the poor nations in the conference hall, opposing the plunder of the world by the giant multinationals, leading the fight against globalisation than Fidel Castro and the Cuban government? That is why the US authorities conspired to prevent Castro attending: they were afraid of him, afraid of Cuba and the love the poor and struggling people of the world have for Cuba. That is why Fidel Castro could not come to Seattle – they were afraid of Cuba’s moral and political power.
When we looked at the riot police attacking the demonstrators in Seattle, we saw a country that gaols more of its people than any other country in the world. The USA spends more on private police forces than on the public police force. 28 million US citizens live in privately guarded, walled and electronically fenced communities, fortresses where the elite hide their wealth.
FRFI says that globalisation is an expression of capitalist crisis. Its features are:
- A huge increase in the export of capital. Last year Britain invested more abroad than any other country in the world.
- Growing monopolisation through mergers and take-overs and the dominance of the multinational corporations. Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank have agreed to merge. Their combined assets exceed $1.25 trillion, about the size of the British economy. Monopolisation means these corporations control ever more aspects of our lives. An example: Deutsche Bank owns 48,000 works of art. Its London offices have meeting rooms named after the illustrious artists whose works are displayed on the walls. There is the Hockney Room, the Bacon Room and Freud Room. The entrance hall is decorated with Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Anish Kapoor. Such is the destiny of modern art – to get a meeting room of your own in the palaces of these latter-day Medicis.
- The unprecedented autonomy of the financial system from real production, the $3 trillion a day speculated in financial casinos, where the click of a mouse can send the Asian Tigers into depression.
- Cuts in state welfare, now directed against so called ‘dole cheats’ in an attack that threatens to criminalise millions of people in Britain.
- The dramatic rise in the exploitation of labour and intensity of work. Beneath the US boom are wages barely above their 1970s’ levels. The average working year is now a month longer than it was in the 1970s and there is the army of 600,000 to one million and more undocumented, illegal Hispanic workers fleeing the ravages of Mexico and Central America.
- Growing mass unemployment and poverty.
Mozambique
Mozambique now joins the over 80 countries whose incomes are going backwards. People in Britain in 1820 had incomes per head on average six times those of people in Mozambique today. Their homes were washed away like sticks in a river. Mozambique is a country of 19 million people whose foreign debt is about double its national income of $4.5 billion. If that debt were to be paid – and it cannot be paid – debt service payments would amount to 83% of government revenues. Three quarters of Mozambique’s women are illiterate, as are half the men. Life expectancy is 45 years and two thirds of the people do not have access to safe drinking water. Infant mortality is 130 per 1,000 live births. There is a disaster every day of these people’s lives.
One medium-sized British multinational that exports molasses from Mozambique, Tate and Lyle (founded by Sir Henry Tate who also founded the Tate Gallery), has annual sales 50% greater than Mozambique’s economy. Tate and Lyle’s directors include directors of the Bank of England, GKN, Daimler Chrysler, Lonrho, the Northern Ireland Development Board, Equitable Life Assurance, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, BCE (Canada’s biggest telecommunications company), Unilever, the LIFFE and the Royal Opera House. These are members of a ruling class responsible for the condition of Mozambique today, having backed the apartheid regime in its 14 years proxy war to destroy Mozambican independence.
About 40% of Mozambique’s budget is made up of aid. The British government has said that it will provide £5.8 million over two years to help Mozambique recover from the floods. This is exactly one hundredth what is now spent on male toiletries in Britain each year. More is spent on male hair colourants than the government is sending in aid to Mozambique. A market researcher explains the growth in male toiletry sales; ‘The vanity barriers traditionally attached to being a “bloke” have diminished as the materialistic attitude to life has made appearance more important.’ The brand leader is Faberge, owned by Unilever, which sells its products in Mozambique, imposing reckless wants on Third World people.
So there we have it: globalisation means we can fly molasses, cut flowers and mangetout daily from East Africa to London, but it took over a week to send four helicopters in the other direction to Mozambique, as government ministries haggled over the bill of £2 million or £1 million.
Danger signals of the destructiveness of capitalism on the environment have been flashing for over 40 years. Just when capitalism should be jamming on the brakes it pushes down harder on the accelerator. We are travelling at 100 miles per hour down a dead-end street. Millions of people the world over oppose the subordination of science to weapons production and profits. We oppose the subordination of media and communications to marketing and sales. We oppose the subordination of the planet to multinational corporations and production for profits. That is why we say Cuba leads and we fight with her.
This is an edited version of a speech given by TREVOR RAYNE at Rock around the Blockade’s Boycott Bacardi! Smash the US Blockade! dayschool on 11 March.
