Africa: Forced to Clean Up After a Party It Didn’t Attend
August 24, 2008
“Africa
and the rest of the Global South are owed a huge historical and
ecological debt for slavery, colonialism, and centuries of exploitation”
By Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond
Durham South Africa, 23 August 2008
“We are the creditors!” insist a new layer of African social
activists, victimised by the ongoing Third World debt crisis but now
gathered to fight back.
And they are right, particularly when we consider how much the
global north has looted from the south in ecological terms.
Last week, the Africa chapters of the social movement Jubilee South
converged in Nairobi to debunk limited “debt relief” by northern powers
and to plan the next stage of campaigning.
In Johannesburg, the revival of Jubilee South Africa is partly based
upon members’ attention to the “reverse debt” owed by big capital for
environmental damage.
Eco-debt
Ecological debt is an important concept for our collective future,
as a new official simulation of the disastrous impact of rising sea
levels on Cape Town creates similar concerns for us in Durban.
Who should pay for mitigating global warming and adaptation?
After all, hedonistic northern hemisphere financial agencies
(especially the World Bank), corporations, governments and consumers
made most of the greenhouse gas mess.
Yet Africans will clean up after the party they didn’t go to, and
pay mightily in the process: increased droughts and floods will leave
potentially 90% of the continent’s food producers at risk by 2100,
according to the main UN climate body.
That bill should now be reckoned and invoiced, to recover trillions
of rands’ worth of ecological credits given unwillingly to industrial
countries each year for their illegitimate occupation of too much
global “environmental space”.
According to the leading scientist in the field, Autonomous
University of Barcelona’s Joan Martinez-Alier, “The notion of
ecological debt is not particularly radical”.
“Think of the environmental liabilities incurred by firms under the
United States Superfund legislation, or of the engineering field called
restoration ecology, or the proposals by the Swedish government to
calculate the country’s environmental debt.”
His examples are diverse: “Nutrients in exports including virtual
water, the oil and minerals no longer available, the biodiversity
destroyed, sulphur dioxide emitted by copper smelters, the mine
tailings, the harm to health from flower exports, the pollution of
water by mining, the commercial use of information and knowledge on
genetic resources, when they have been appropriated gratis
(‘bio-piracy’), and agricultural
genetic resources.”
As for the north’s “lack of payment for environmental services or
for the disproportionate use of environmental space”, Martinez-Alier
criticises “imports of solid or liquid toxic waste, and free disposal
of gas residues (carbon dioxide, CFCs, etc)”.
The sums involved are potentially vast.
The founder of eco-feminism, Vandana Shiva, and the South Centre’s
Yash Tandon estimate that seed bio-piracy “contributes some [US]$66
billion annually to the US economy”.
Another $75 billion is effectively donated by the south to the north
each year through mopping up carbon emissions in tropical forests,
according to the UN.
A 2005 study commissioned by the Edmonds Institute and African
Centre for Biosafety identified nearly three dozen cases of biopiracy,
such as a diabetes drug produced by a Kenyan microbe; antibiotics from
a Gambian termite hill; an antifungal from a Namibian giraffe; the
South African and Namibian indigenous appetite suppressant Hoodia; and
drug addiction treatments in kombo butter from Central and West Africa.
Jubilee South Africa is focusing on the damage done by platinum
mining in the North West and Limpopo, especially by AngloPlats, which
exports profits from non-renewable resource extraction to London
shareholders in spite of intense community protest.
Another Jubilee campaign supports the Wild Coast’s Amadiba Crisis
Committee against the coming titanium grab by Australia’s Mineral
Resource Commodities firm.
In now familiar ANC crony-capitalist style, the firm has full
support from South African minister Buyelwa Sonjica, who on August 15
launched a bizarre attack in Xolobeni upon heroic eco-lawyer Richard
Spoor.
Courts
In all these ways, ecological debt is now being tabulated.
Promising a wave of formal debt audits across the continent,
Nairobi-based Africa Jubilee South co-ordinator Njoki Njehu concluded
that: “Africa and the rest of the Global South are owed a huge
historical and ecological debt for slavery, colonialism, and centuries
of exploitation.”
Brutus again goes to the New York Southern District courts in late
September, as his and the Khulumani/Jubilee case continues against
three dozen multinational corporations that supported apartheid.
Our column in the July 8 Durban Mercury argued that these
firms need a strong legal signal so they desist from investing in
repressive regimes such as Burma, Zimbabwe and the Sudan.
We raised this with deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad at a recent
parliamentary seminar hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and he
sounded concerned, but unable to dislodge Pretoria’s anti-reparations
alliance with Bush, Brown, Merkel and the corporations.
Reprinted from the Durban Mercury,
via Green
Left Weekly. Patrick Bond and Dennis Brutus update the
eco-debt campaign at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs.
More information can be found at http://www.jubileesouth.org.
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