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Millennium blues for greens

As we enter the 21st century, it is difficult not to be dismayed with the setbacks that the environmental movement has been witnessing, both in this country and throughout the world. The promise that the next century would be one where greens everywhere would play a much more prominent role in public life may not turn out to be true. If anything has caught the imagination, at least of the 'haves' all around the world, it is the prospect of globalisation and the belief that everyone, no matter how poor, will finally catch up with the industrialised countries and enjoy their living standards. It never seems to occur to these daydreamers that the natural resources of the planet do not permit consumption on this scale.

The globalisation of the world economy poses a big threat to the environmental movement, which preaches a contrary philosophy: that nations, and peoples within nations, must learn to live within their natural resource constraints and not consume goods and resources at a rate which is not sustainable. It is not just a North-South divide but even within each country, there are elites whose lifestyles that are in every way as prodigal as those of rich nations. One has also to realise that the global economy is growing increasingly speculative, as distinct from productive, and that jeopardises sustainable development. Even by 1992, the total value of financial assets traded in worldwide markets was $35 trillion - twice the GDP of the 23 richest industrial countries. As the American economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin pointed out a few years ago, something like $1.3 trillion is speculated on in financial markets every day. This exceeds the total gold and foreign currency reserves of all members of the IMF, which gives a pretty good idea of how financial capital rules supreme. A tiny tax on this speculation would yield sufficient funds to meet people's basic needs.

The biggest financial market, according to American historian Jerry Harris, is the buying and selling of foreign currency itself, which is worth 60 times more than the world trade in manufactured goods. Stock markets are also spreading throughout the world and conduct $13 trillion worth of business daily. The people who deal in such transactions, typically, sit in front of their computer screens and never interact with other people: they are alienated from social production and base their decisions purely on information. When it comes to goods and services, anything can be produced anywhere and sold everywhere. Half the largest economies in the world belong to transnational companies, not countries. Manufacturing, which used to absorb a third of the US work force in the 1950s, accounts for only 17 per cent today.

Greens and other opponents of this global process are dismissed as Cassandras, die-hards who seek to hold back the hands of the clock of history. It is inevitable, they say, that manufacture will give way to services and in particular to the growth of the information sector. This category is the single largest employer in the US today, accounting for a fifth of all labour. However, as the American author Jeremy Rifkin, who has written The End of Work, points out, these knowledge workers are becoming more and more skilled, and characteristically, a tiny elite earns fabulous salaries, while the bulk of the working class is rendered unemployed or underemployed. By 1995, 60 per cent of all jobs in the US were part-time, temporary or home-based. The same percentage of all workers earned less than $20,000 a year and nearly a fifth on a 40-hour week took home wages which were below the US poverty line. The Indian situation is similar. The decline of jobs in manufacturing in Mumbai, the industrial and commercial capital, is hoped to be made up by the rise in financial services, which is plainly impossible. Only the so-called informal sector has been growing relentlessly.

In the global 'casino' of speculative investment, only the MNCs make a profit - not necessarily the country where they are located. Special exporting processing zones like SEEPZ in Mumbai employ 27 million workers around the world, 90 per cent being women. MNCs hire 12 million workers in the South today. For instance, Nike makes shoes in Indonesia at a cost of $5.60 but sell for between $75 and $135 a pair globally. It paid Michael Jordan, the sports celebrity, $20 million to promote its brand, while 12,000 Indonesian workers earn $5 million a year. The German car manufacturer BMW, on the other hand, transferred its production line to South Carolina, where it pays workers $12 an hour as against $28 it would have to pay at home. Machines are also taking over functions of workers everywhere. Ford cut its working hours (and jobs!) by nearly half in the 1980s, but its productivity increased by 57 per cent. General Motors is valued at around $35 billion, while Microsoft is worth more than twice as much.

Many of the world's most powerful personages see these trends as a harbinger of the third industrial revolution, the first being the shift from agriculture to industry in the 18th century and the second the introduction of electricity in the 19th. The former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development believes that the development of the Internet is akin to Columbus' voyage to the New World in 1492. According to him, the virtual world is the equivalent of the seventh continent, with boundless potential. This is a great deal of hype, considering that only 2 per cent of the world's population uses Internet today and half has not even made a phone call ever in their lives. For that matter, for all the 'globaloney' about opening markets, only 12 countries received 80 per cent of the foreign direct investment in 1997, leaving the136 others less than $30 billion to share between them, which was less than what the UK alone received.

Greens had looked forward to a new global paradigm after the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where the complementary concerns of environment and development would be addressed. The basic document which spelled these out for the next century was called Agenda 21. It had also been pointed out several times during those debates that the best way for developing countries to protect their environments was to ensure a basic living standard. The bulk of this effort had to come from the countries themselves, in terms of health, literacy, sanitation and so on. But industrial countries, by virtue of the fact that they had contributed to global warming, were to bear a part of this burden, which they have abysmally failed to do. As the recent WTO meet at Seattle made clear, the North is primarily concerned with markets for its goods and services, not with the well-being of the majority of people around the globe.

In countries like Germany, there has in fact been somewhat of a backlash against green movements, even though the Green party is represented in parliament and even the Foreign Minister belongs to it. This has not yet happened in this country, but it may only be a matter of time before the central government objects to movements against power plants, highways, dams and the like on the ground that it is the lack of infrastructure which is deterring foreign investors. The elite will also toe this line. The prospects for the environmental movement, therefore, looks somewhat bleak. The only heartening feature is that the spread of the Internet has also made information much more readily accessible and in that sense, rendered all decision-making transparent. This has to led to a degree of democratisation between the state and people within countries and between countries themselves. It remains to be seen how green groups everywhere are able to use this modern tool to their advantage.

Darryl D'Monte