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Western governments and their media are dominating the agenda for next
month’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro – just as their people consume most
of the world’s natural resources and contribute most of its pollution. But
citizens’ groups in the Third World are fighting back. They say that Western
environmentalists – along with Western governments, banks and multinationals
– have too much power. What is required is a new global order based on environmental
democracy.

Two of the most persuasive voices from the Third World in the corridors
of Washington and Geneva, where the Earth Summit’s agenda has been thrashed
out over the past year, are Martin Khor Kok Peng, director of the Third
World Network based in Malaysia, and Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre
for Science and the Environment in India. They see democracy, both internationally
and within countries, as the key to halting both environmental destruction
and the impoverishment of three-quarters of the world’s population.

Khor, an economist trained at the University of Oxford, has spent much
of his career as an activist fighting the policies of the Malaysian government,
which sanctions the rapid destruction of the rainforests of Borneo by logging
companies. But on the international stage, he backs his government against
those of the West. ‘In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Third World governments
feel more vulnerable to the economic and financial dictates of Western interests,’
he says. ‘Third World countries are suspicious that ‘environmental protection’
will become another Western instrument to dictate to them.’

This fear, says Khor, has come true in the run-up to Rio. ‘Although
the Earth Summit is supposed to integrate environment and development, the
West has been more interested in discussing the environment. Moreover, some
Western governments steer the discussions to interpret the environment their
way. They place high priority on global issues such as ozone depletion,
climate change and biodiversity, while showing little interest in the environmental
problems of the Third World, such as desertification and the lack of clean
water. When Southern governments in the pre-Rio negotiations proposed a
ban on the export of hazardous substances, wastes and industries, all the
major Western countries objected.’ Agarwal, a former adviser to the assassinated
Indian president Rajiv Gandhi, agrees that ‘every element of the global
environmental agenda is being chosen by the Western world. It is pushing
a new international ecological order down the throats of a hapless Third
°Â´Ç°ù±ô»å.’

The Earth Summit is the brainchild of the World Commission on Environment
and Development, chaired by the Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The commission presented its report, Our Common Future, to the UN General
Assembly in 1987. Agarwal questions the basic assumption of the report,
that we are all in the same boat and must act together. In a manifesto
for the Earth Summit, he writes: ‘There can be no honest and moral discussion
of international environmental solidarity as long as the world remains
starkly divided between the rich and poor – between those who can enjoy
the resources of the Earth and can worry about its future, and those who
have to scrape the soil for less than bare survival today.’

Most Westerners believe that their style of development, whatever the
environmental side effects, will eventually drag the rest of the world out
of a mire of poverty and ignorance. They believe that Western know-how is
the most likely to clean up the mess created along the way, and find paths
to the environmentalists’ Holy Grail of sustainable development.

Colonial heritage

Agarwal rejects this view. His native India, he points out, has one
of the longest-lasting and prosperous cultures in the world. ‘Before the
British came, India was nearly 100 per cent literate and probably more urbanised
than any other country in the world,’ he claims. ‘But colonialism disrupted
all this. The entire economic-ecological system was turned round to produce
goods not for local people’s needs but for the metropolitan markets of
the colonising power.’ Much of India was pauperised, de-urbanised and rendered
illiterate. It follows that a revival of indigenous Indian culture and
skills will be the key to its economic and ecological revival.

During the past few decades, says Khor, institutions such as the World
Bank have further exacerbated the divide between the rich and poor worlds,
at the expense of the environment of the Third World. ‘The postcolonial
development model adopted by most Third World governments called on them
to expand their exports of commodities. This has led to higher output, oversupply
and lower prices – with disastrous economic effects. In much of Africa and
Latin America living standards fell during the 1980s to below those of a
generation ago.’

Khor links this decline to the environmental crisis. Western-style development
has brought the Third World ‘accelerated depletion of natural resources
such as forests and minerals, the importing of inappropriate Western technologies
to replace more ecologically sound systems of agriculture, fisheries and
animal husbandry, and the transfer to the Third World of polluting industries,
unsafe products and toxic wastes’.

Two centuries ago, incomes in Europe were roughly twice those in a country
such as India. Today, says Khor, they are 15 times as high. Rich countries
with 20 per cent of the world’s population consume 80 per cent of the world’s
resources and produce 80 per cent of its pollution. Even so, the Earth Summit
has so far seen ‘a lot of focus on the Third World’s mistakes and the need
to change to ‘sustainable development’, but very little has been concretely
discussed about the Western economic system on which the Third World’s development
is based’.

In this he echoes the view of Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador
to the UN and one of the architects of the Earth Summit. Tickell complained
at a conference in London last October: ‘It has been painful to attend
numerous meetings where the rich countries think this is a Third World problem.
It isn’t. It is primarily a first world problem.’

Western environmentalists fall into the same trap. At a conference
in London last September, Bruce Smart of the Washington-based World Resources
Institute spoke of how Western green consumers and free markets could be
the engines for environmental progress in the Third World. He claimed that
the US led the world in many areas of environmental protection, adding
that its failure to act against global warming arose only because ’34 US
senators are in states producing coal and oil’.

The World Resources Institute crossed swords with Agarwal last year
after it exaggerated the impact of the loss of tropical forests on the greenhouse
effect and when it implied that large Third World countries, such as India
and China, were major contributors to global warming because of their large
populations (New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Forum, 1 February).

Such tensions are made worse because American environmental groups can
apply pressure on institutions such as the World Bank, thereby gaining more
influence on environmental policies in Third World countries than on their
own legislatures. And they use that influence. Americans can halt a Brazilian
dam or end tax concessions for cattle ranchers in rainforests. They can
organise consumer resistance to imports of animal furs or tropical timbers
or tuna. But, as Agarwal puts it: ‘No Bangladeshi can intervene in the development
processes of Northern economies, even if global warming caused largely by
Northern emissions may submerge half the country.’

Rather than this imbalance being redressed, says Agarwal, environmental
management ‘is being thrust on the developing world using the existing levers
of power’. Thus Western governments are insisting that any new funds that
they give for projects agreed at the Earth Summit must be channelled through
the Global Environment Facility, a new body under the management of the
World Bank, supported by many environmentalists and dominated by donors
of aid from the West.

Reflecting the interests of those donors, ‘the Global Environment Facility
lends only for so-called global issues’, says Agarwal. ‘So desertification
and soil erosion have become local problems regardless of the fact that
they affect millions today, while ozone depletion, which is the result of
the overconsumption of a few, has become a global issue.’

Put at its simplest, says Agarwal, there are two environmental agendas.
In the rich world, the issue is pollution, which is now beginning to upset
global resources, such as the atmosphere itself. In the Third World, the
issue is the management of natural resources, such as forests and fisheries,
on which most of the poor still depend for their livelihoods. But while
the operation of the global economy increasingly allows Western countries
to clean up their act and charge the bill to the rest of the world, Third
World countries are given no such option.

‘Enormous investments have been made by Northern countries in pollution
control, and all consumers of Northern products across the world now pay
the cost of those investments,’ says Agarwal. But for the developing world
‘the terms of trade of its various products – tea, coffee, cocoa, bananas,
pineapples, peanuts and prawns – have been steadily declining, even though
they are produced at enormous environmental costs’. As a result, the developing
world cannot afford to invest in measures to reduce the ecological costs
of its production practices.

The inequities of world trade are being compounded by the terms of
the debate about the global environment. The Earth Summit, says Agarwal,
is essentially about the use of natural resources. These fall into two categories.
Some, such as the role of the atmosphere as a dumping ground for pollution,
are ‘global commons’. Others, like forests and biodiversity, are traditionally
regarded as national resources.

Today, the developing countries are being asked to surrender control
of their national resources. But they are not being offered equal access
to global resources, because these are already overused by the rich countries.
This inequality makes ‘a sham of the very idea of our common future’, says
Agarwal. ‘Give the South a fair deal and it can take account of the ecological
costs of producing its commodities and take care of its environment.’

Much of what Agarwal and Khor say up to this point would be accepted
by their national governments. For instance, Malaysia, one of the leading
negotiators among the developing countries at the Summit, has refused to
countenance a global convention to protect the forests of individual nations
unless the rich countries agree to a climate change convention that limits
their emissions of greenhouse gases.

But the activists’ agenda is much wider than this simple power play
between Western and Third World governments. Khor and the Third World Network
fear the absence from Earth Summit talks of proposals to control big business.
Whatever governments may say and do, argues Khor, the big multinational
companies are ‘the main entities responsible for the global environmental
crisis’. Their activities account for 50 per cent of all emissions of greenhouse
gases, for instance. Many have budgets larger than some countries.

Khor says that, despite a lot of rhetoric about companies burnishing
their green images, ‘busi-nesses involved in resource extraction show no
signs of limiting the growth or reducing the negative environmental impacts
of their activities. They have accelerated the sale of hazardous substances,
products and wastes to the Third World, despite increasing public outcry.’

Competition between companies is too fierce for self-regulation to work,
he says. ‘Public regulation, through the setting of industry-wide standards
backed up by law and effective enforcement, is required.’ But smaller countries
compete with each other for the investment of multinationals. And most governments
‘are unable even to adequately monitor (let alone regulate or control)
multinational operations within their countries’. So for regulation to be
effective it must be operated internationally. Yet, far from proposing such
checks, the international community is moving in the opposite direction.
According to Khor, trade liberalisation proposals before the Uruguay Round
of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), ‘would render many
existing national controls over foreign enterprises illegal under international
±ô²¹·É’.

Corrupt practice

The tendency to present Third World governments as victims is strong.
But this does not mean the Third World is absolved from blame. ‘In many
parts of the South, there is a combination of corruption, political patronage
and financial mismanagement,’ says Khor. ‘But even here, Western-controlled
institutions play a role. While many political leaders are corrupt, it is
international big business that offers the kickbacks.’

How can we reverse these trends? For both Khor and Agarwal, the key
is greater democracy, at the expense of Third World as well as Western governments.
Agarwal foresees ‘a system of global environmental governance based not
on targets and objectives, but on basic human rights – in which individuals,
communities and nations have been effectively empowered to protect, manage
and use their resources’.

Environmental problems can be divided, he says, between those tackled
at a community level and those that can best be solved by global management.
‘So, the existing nation-states must give up some of their sovereignty to
the village republic in the first place, and the global republic in the
²õ±ð³¦´Ç²Ô»å.’

Agarwal has spent much of the past decade reporting how Indian villagers
can, given the chance, regenerate their local environments, increasing forest
cover, water supply and crop yields. Governments everywhere, he says, must
hand back nationalised forests, grasslands and farms to the communities
that use them. Meanwhile, the ‘global commons’, such as the oceans and atmosphere,
need a global guiding hand.

In the Third World, the distinction between environmental campaigners,
consumer groups, human rights activists and aid organisations is barely
recognised. Khor’s activities from his base in Penang, Malaysia, for instance,
include protecting the rights of hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of
Borneo, writing reports on consumer products, agitating for workers’ safety
in factories and on farms, and fighting pollution with the Malaysian branch
of Friends of the Earth.

He calls all this work ‘broadening the democratic spaces in our own
national societies’. Now, he says, this fight must be extended to the international
arena. ‘The Earth Summit process should be an opportunity to expand the
democratic spaces in the international institutions that shape world policy
– the World Bank, the GATT and so on.’ Without that push, especially in
the sphere of economics and trade, ‘there is little hope for any genuine
partnership on environment’. If the Third World is to talk seriously about
ecology, he concludes, the West must first talk about economics. For both
Khor and Agarwal, liberty, equality and environmental survival are indivisible.

Fred Pearce will be reporting from Rio on the Earth Summit for New
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Further reading The Centre for Science and the Environment’s Statement
on Global Environmental Democracy is available from the centre at F-6 Kailash
Colony, New Delhi 110048, India