NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5385

Text File | 1992-07-27 | 6.5 KB | 129 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: "Keep Your Pollution!" (Article)
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    "...Seventy percent of our water is polluted...In a country where
    people cannot afford staple foods, the best land goes into tea,
    coffee, sugar cane, tobacco, and spices ... Multi-national
    companies that open factories in the East should be monitored
    strictly for safety procedures.  Hundreds of units in India spew
    poison into the waters daily ..." (From article which follows)
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   "The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of
   Eastern Europe to the "sick system" (quite accurately), while
   ignoring the catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions
   when some problem is noticed, attributing it to any cause other
   than the system that consistently brings it about."
    -- Noam Chomsky, part II of _The Victors_ [of the
    Cold War]. Send 1-line email message consisting of GET CHOMSKY
    VICTORS2 ACTIV-L to the address: [e-mail] for a copy
    of that article
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Transcribed by: [e-mail] (Cameron L. Spitzer)
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>From the Third World Network Features Agency of Penang, Malaysia.
Maneka Gandhi is India's former minister for the environment and
forests.
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                   Keep Your Pollution! Says One Expert
                             by Maneka Gandhi

    Practically all environmental degradation in the East is due to
overconsumption in the West.  Consumption has many facets.  First is
the excessive and wasteful use of resources by the West--resources
that it extracts forcibly, using the new colonial weapons of the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other aid to keep us
more amenable to exporting our irreplaceable assets.  Second, to keep
Western industries going, inefficient, outdated, and harmful machinery
and chemicals are forcibly dumped on the East.

    Most important, however, is the constant brainwashing to the
effect that prosperity means the Western way of life--more of
everything and bigger, faster, more waste-generating.  This generates
imitation and raises consumption levels of people and countries that
cannot afford it.  It also destroys nature-based economics without
replacing them with anything better.

    The generation and distribution of electricity are one example.
India has bought Western-style thermal plants and dams (and now
nuclear plants), and 90 percent of the machinery in both comes from
the West.  These thermal plants work at less than 50 percent of their
capacity.  Sixteen hundred dams provide only 2.5 percent of the
country's power, and the damage they cause, by flooding during the
monsoon, runs into the millions of dollars.


    Fewer than 10 percent of our villages are electrified, because the
power system does not work.  But that does not prevent the West from
selling, or giving us as aid, new power plants that will need new
machinery after a few years, which can then be sold at double the
normal price.

    Seventy percent of our water is polluted.  A large part of that is
due to pesticides that have been sold to us by countries that have
banned the use of such products for themselves.  Look at the diversion
of land for export crops to help pay our international debt--debt
incurred by the cost of oil and machinery.  In a country where people
cannot afford staple foods, the best land goes into tea, coffee, sugar
cane, tobacco, and spices.  All of these use a heavy concentration of
pesticides and enormous amounts of water and are sold on the
international market at prices fixed by the West that are lower today
than they were in 1980!  The most amazing land use is for fodder and
flowers.  Every seventh pound of meat eaten in Europe is from animals
raised on grain grown in the East.  So our people can grow grain for
animals so that people in the West can eat meat.

    Reorganization must take place.  Is it essential to truck fruits
from Italy to Sweden every day?  Is it necessary to have a second car?
Is it necessary to use disposable diapers?  Is it necessary to use a
non-renewable resource such as oil in such wasteful ways that the
price goes up and the Third World's burden of debt increases even
further?  Was it necessary to sell us chlorofluorocarbon technology 10
years after the West had discovered that it was destroying the ozone
layer?

    The greatest harm done to the environment by the West is through
the spread of an ideology about growth that has taken firm root among
our Third World elite.  The axioms of this ideology are simple: More
growth is good, less growth is worrying; negative growth is
disastrous.

    Multi-national companies that open factories in the East should be
monitored strictly for safety procedures.  Hundreds of units in India
spew poison into the waters daily.  Of course, Union Carbide is a case
in point, making a chemical in Bhopal, India, that it was not allowed
to make in the U.S. and making it in the most careless way possible.

    The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) should be
strengthened and given sanction-making powers.  It could act as a
monitor for restraining environmentally inefficient machinery and
harmful chemicals from being forced on the East.  Where it is
established that a developing country has been coerced into
consumption, the debt should be written off.  UNEP could be the
channel to pass on the latest technologies that are suitable for
Eastern land, water, and weather conditions.  It could also enforce
the "polluter pays" principle, which would in time have its effect on
Wetern governments and companies.  It could come up with solutions
that sustain life, not destroy it.

    The East is ready to listen.  Is the West?

[end]
Keyed to disk by Cameron Spitzer, aka [e-mail], from the
June 1992 _World Press Review_.  _WPR_'s headline was "The West Sets a
Bad Example."