Spearheaded by Accion Ecologica from Ecuador, SPEDCA seeks to build a movement highlighting hundreds of years of incalculable ecological debt owed by northern countries to Third World countries. 

“As the industrialised countries have united in the Paris Club in order to strengthen themselves and to press for the payment of the external debt of the Third World countries, in the same way the campaign is forming the Southern People’s Ecological Debt Creditors Alliance. 

“The objective is to unite and strengthen the peoples of the Third World in order to make evident the magnitude of the Ecological Debt which the Northern industrialised countries have with us and demand: 

1. International recognition of the ecological debt, historical and current, that Northern countries owe Third World countries. 

2. International recognition of the illegitimacy of external debt as made evident by ecological debt. 

3. Demand that Northern countries: 

• repatriate plundered cultural and natural heritage, including genetic materials;
• restore those natural areas damaged by mining and monoculture agriculture;
• reduce carbon emissions and destructive consumption patterns;
• eliminate all conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, products and toxic substances that threaten the life of this planet;
• recognise and give rights to the increasing migration of poor people displaced by the neoliberal model which promotes external and ecological debt.”

 If the nineties were about international agreements to promote sustainable development, it seems the noughties are going to be about growing street protest and civil disobedience in response to the failure of those agreements to deliver on their promises. There is growing consensus that the actions of the dominant global powers continue to defend and encourage an unjustly structured global system in which the rich get richer and the poor become poorer. 

Launched at a public forum in Prague during the August protests at the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, SPEDCA points out that ruling elites in indebted Third World countries are being forced to impose ever increasing and unsustainable social and environmental costs on poor people. Simply put, the globalisation process is being structured to create an increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few through privatisation, job losses, environmental destruction and forcing governments to cut back on their social spending on safety nets for growing numbers of poor people. In 1960 the richest 20% in the world had a combined income 30 times greater than the poorest 20%. In 1991 this ratio had doubled to over 60 times, and by 1998 the richest 20% accumulated 78 times more than the poorest 20%. 

Representatives from diverse Third World countries at the SPEDCA launch presented case after case in which policies and adjustments imposed by the World Bank and the IMF were resulting in major environmental destruction and further impoverishment of already poor people. In addition to sharing country-specific case studies, the ecological debt workshop spoke of climate change in which the G7 richest countries produced a global carbon debt calculated at $13 to 16 trillion per year. 

While the World Bank and IMF impose adjustment programs on the poorest countries unable to pay mounting interest on foreign debt, the failed climate change negotiations mean that no impositions are being placed on the carbon debtors responsible for climate change-induced natural disasters. 

In the ten years preceding 1998, natural disasters were estimated to claim 50 000 lives a year and cause damage of more than $60 billion annually(1). Between 1990 and 1998, 94 percent of the 568 world’s major natural disasters and more than 97% of related deaths occurred in developing countries.(2)  
  

Notes: