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- When aid's no help
Poor nations don't need aid, just fair trade and freedom from
WTO
By WAYNE ROBERTS, From
NOW Magazine Online Edition
Western response to the tsunami
catastrophe - the magnificent generosity of everyday folks, the
widespread sense that we are all creatures of the same planet
and need to care for one another - has left me both heart-warmed
and mind-saddened.
Part of me wants to form an
anti-defamation league on behalf of nature, which the media is
referring to as if it were a terrorist instead of a beneficent
force. Part of me wonders when the white man's burden will cease
to define how Western humanitarians think about aid to the colonized
South.
The massive wave that destroyed
so many lives has also brought in its wake new scrutiny of the
West's falling foreign aid budgets. For example, Canada's has
dived from .45 per cent of our GNP in 1992 to .26 per cent in
2003. But the call for a jump in aid (not to be confused with
relief) generated by this disaster makes me very nervous. It
doesn't often make it into the sound bites these days, but people
in the colonized South don't need aid. They need rights and fair
trade and freedom from the World Trade Organization, the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Mulling over these mixed feelings,
I meet with Meyer Brownstone, the octogenarian dean of global
anti-hunger and development policy, former chair of Oxfam Canada
and Oxfam International, and recipient of Canada's Pearson Prize
for his lifetime efforts on behalf of peace and development.
He's calling for a rethink
of what's behind the tragedy and what needs to be done to move
on wisely.
For Brownstone, the much-touted
"inevitable" waves of economic progress are as much
to blame for the results of the tsunami as the original earthquake.
Like other supposedly "natural"
disasters that seem to plague the Third World mudslides
after torrential rains in Central America or drought and desertification
in Africa there's a human-made element, he says.
Brownstone managed a project
in badly hit Sulawesi Island off the coast of Indonesia during
the 1990s, when coastal mangrove forests still served as a windbreak
that protected coral reefs, thereby doubly cushioning the force
of battering storm waves. Those mangrove forests, habitat over
millennia for fishing beds that supported small coastal villages,
have since all been dynamited and bulldozed to make way for shrimp
farms built by Japanese investors.
The world's addiction to cheap
shrimp "destroyed nature's protective barrier," Brownstone
says. Environmentalists warned against this for at least a decade,
and some staff at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization
referred to the shrimp industry as a "rape-and-run job."
But the World Bank funded it, leading Indian food analyst Devinder
Sharma reports.
The same story of destruction
by factory shrimp farmers was repeated in most areas hammered
by the unbroken force of the tsunami. Thailand lost half its
mangroves over the last quarter-century, reports University of
Wyoming professor Edward Barbier, a leading writer on economics
and resource development. First, the poor lost the traditional
fishing grounds that were their livelihood. Then they lost their
lives, he says.
Imperialism is a beach, and
around Tamil Nadu on India's coast, where many lives were lost,
hotel and casino operators ignored environmentalists' warnings
and destroyed protective shoreline cover. "When the dead
have been cremated or buried," writes Indian peace activist
J. Sri Raman, "it will be time to tell the people that environmentalism
is not elitism."
The land use planning axiom
in most of the Third World, where the poor are forced to live
on the beach, plays to the tune of "to them that hath shall
be given, and from them that hath not, lo, even that shall be
taken away."
The process is laid out in
gruesome detail in the just-released report from the University
of Manchester, The Chronic Poverty Report, 2004-05. As many as
420 million people around the world and as many as 190
million people in the area hit by the tsunami live in chronic
poverty and in what the study calls "spatial traps.''
These are worthless lands along
river banks and flood plains, on tiny islands, beside deserts
or up steep mountain slopes precisely the areas most vulnerable
to and least protected from hurricanes, floods, heat waves and
earthquakes. Their lives are tsunamis waiting to happen.
The chronically poor
many of them forced into cities by the economic tsunami of massively
subsidized First World farm products crashing onto the shores
of the unsubsidized Third World after the free trade deals of
the 1990s may be half the world's urban population by 2020.
The fact that those still in the countryside are forced to live
in exposed and dangerous places is also a development crisis,
since they've been pushed off their traditional lands to make
way for cattle, miners and loggers.
What guidelines for donors
does Brownstone suggest? "Tied aid," the in-kind donation
of manufactured and farm goods from the donor country the
norm in Canada and the U.S. is a no-no, he says. (The feds
are considering dropping the requirement that most of our food
aid come from Canuck farms. It's a reg that infuriates relief
groups here that don't want to squander donations on huge freight
costs for shipping food to Asia.)
And "military humanitarianism,"
such as the expensive transport of Canada's DART, is "nonsense"
and "late-entry symbolism," he says. The military has
expertise in pacification, not development, and spends money
on travel that should go to credible and frugal NGOs already
on the ground.
Once the need for emergency
aid has passed, I can't help thinking the industrial North can
best help by staying out of the way. The notion of restoring
foreign aid to 1990 levels, or back to levels associated with
the Marshall Plan after the second world war, is simply wrong-headed.
What's the use of handing over
aid to governments that are basket cases? Individuals need democratic
rights and support for civil society so that their leaders can
no longer degrade aid by turning it into a process whereby "the
poor in the rich counties give to the rich of the poor countries."
Governments in the colonized
South, as elsewhere, need to regain the economic sovereignty
taken away by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and
World Trade Organization. They need to be able to shape their
own tariff policies and stop the European and American food invasion
(Canada is better in this regard), a consequence of the lack
of trade barriers.
Poor nations need to be encouraged
to stop importing heavily subsidized food for their middle classes.
(Europeans subsidize cows to the tune of $2 a day greater
than the average $1 a day many Third World people live on.)
If people want to help in a
personal way, once the immediate relief needs are met, they should
stop eating imported shrimp and beef. And donate to groups such
as Via Campesina that are dedicated to self-reliance for farmers
and fisherfolk. Their concept of disaster relief contrasts with
top-down government inefficiency by encouraging the growth of
grassroots civil society, enabling marginalized people to start
taking control of their lives.
And if we want our government
to do something, then we should insist that money slated for
George Bush's missiles-in-space go to satellite warning systems
for future ecological upsets.
news@nowtoronto.com
The Political Tsunami
By Michael I. Niman, AlterNet,
January 14, 2005, Alternet,
January 14, 2005
Humanity deserves a solid pat
on the back this week, as the global humanitarian outpouring
of support for tsunami victims has surpassed all previous relief
efforts in history. The American government may have been stingy,
but the American people certainly haven't, forking over checks
to a host of relief agencies.
We've also seen the tsunami
bring out the worst in humanity the bottom-feeders who
move in when their prey is injured or disabled. In this arena
we're seeing parasitic entrepreneurs engaging in the purchase
and sale of tsunami orphans. And in the Aceh region, where approximately
two-thirds of the tsunami victims lived, the government of Indonesia
is attempting to finish off their brutal campaign against the
Acehnese people and their movement for self-determination.
Aceh is what is called a "breakaway
province." Officially part of Indonesia, for 28 years the
Acehnese have been fighting a military campaign for independence
as a supposedly democratic republic. Using the Bush administration's
"war on terror" and the recent U.S. invasion of Iraq
as justifications, the Indonesian military invaded Aceh in May
2003. They termed this a "shock and awe" operation,
complete with "embedded journalists" and the "blessing
of Sept. 11."
Though the Indonesians claimed
their military operation was a police action aimed at restoring
order in Aceh, it quickly took on the brutal aura of an invasion,
complete with F-16 bombing missions and strafing runs using low-flying
American-built planes.
The Indonesian military is
employing the same tactics in Aceh as it did during its brutal
quarter-century occupation of the now-independent nation of East
Timor, where military operations killed one third of the Timorese
population. In an October 2004 report, Amnesty International
documents "a disturbing pattern of grave abuses of civil,
political, economic, social and cultural rights" in Aceh,
including a wave of "unlawful killings, torture, ill-treatment
and arbitrary detention" that encompass the entire province.
Amnesty also documents that
under Indonesian military occupation, "women and girls have
been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence,"
often doled out in retribution when family members are suspected
of involvement in the independence fight led by the Free Aceh
Movement, which the Indonesians have labeled as a "terrorist
organization."
Shock and Exxon
Why is none of this in the
news? First there's the "embedded reporter" factor.
Indonesia banned all journalists not embedded with the military.
And then there's the economic disincentive. The official economy
of Aceh is based on a massive Exxon/Mobil natural gas extraction
project which, according to estimates on Pacifica Radio's Democracy
Now, has netted $40 billion worth of the resource. Very little
of this money has flowed into the local Acehnese economy, where
nearly a quarter of the children suffered from malnutrition before
the tsunami struck.
This explains both Indonesia's
motivation to maintain tight control over the province, and the
American corporate media's disincentive to cover this remote
region of the world.
In this light, the tsunami
provided a big boost to the Indonesian campaign against Aceh,
killing more Acehnese than they could politically get away while
reeking chaos upon the province. Not satisfied with this sudden
strategic gift, the Indonesian military immediately set upon
the survivors, exacting control over relief operations and withholding
food and water as weapons against the independence movement.
Amnesty International has reported
that it is difficult to document the extent of the abuses in
Aceh since the Indonesians have banned most foreigners (with
the notable exception of Exxon/Mobil workers) and all journalists
from the province. With relief aid, however, came journalists,
who reported on Indonesian troops beating Acehnese who came to
relief centers looking for food. The Indonesians were also requiring
identification cards from tsunami survivors, many of whose houses
are washed away. Acehnese without ID may be interrogated as suspected
rebels an interrogation that in the past often resulted
in death. Journalists reporting this story have been ordered
to leave Aceh, with one commander admonishing Australian journalists
that "Your duty here is to observe the disaster, not the
conflict."
Meanwhile, In the Stone
Age
On a more inspiring note, indigenous
Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Onge, Shompen and Sentinelese people,
survived the tsunami with very little loss of life. Much of the
world originally feared that entire cultures living on remote
islands in India's Andaman and Nicobar island chain were wiped
out by the tidal waves. Global media celebrated the fact that
not only did they seem very much alive, but that a naked Sentinelese
man fired upon an Indian Air Force helicopter with a bow and
arrow.
In covering the story, the
BBC reported that the islanders have very little contact with,
and by inference, understanding of the outside world hence
the arrows. In reality, the indigenous populations of the Andaman
and Nicobar islands have had extensive contact with the outside
world. These descendents of African peoples were first visited
by Marco Polo who described them as "No better than wild
beasts." European slave-traders later raided the islands
for slaves. Starting in the 1800s, British troops visited wholesale
massacres upon the islanders. An Indian land grab in the 20th
century forced most of the remaining islanders from their ancestral
lands. Anthropologists report that slavers continued to raid
the islands well into the second half of the 20th century, long
after the international slave trade was thought dead. So it seems
that the islanders have a much better understanding of the outside
world than the BBC would suspect.
Mangroves and Coral
Where the region's environment
has been damaged over the years, the tsunami damage was much
greater. The wholesale destruction of coral reefs and mangrove
swamps across the Indian Ocean removed the only environmental
barriers that have protected coastal environments from tidal
waves for eternity. Coral reefs have fallen victim to pollution,
dynamite used both in dredging channels and in fishing, and in
quarrying operations where crushed coral is used in construction.
Mangroves have been cut down to make beaches, towns, shrimp farms
and resorts that primarily serve Western consumers.
Some of the worst mangrove
depletion has occurred over the years in Aceh, where satellite
photos show seaside shrimp farms and towns on former mangrove
swamps. Hence, it's no surprise that in Aceh, with the mangrove
swamps that traditionally absorbed such waves and shored up coastal
geology gone, the devastation was so severe. By contrast, areas
that still had coral or mangrove intact, suffered only minor
losses of life. People seeing the turmoil of the waves crashing
above offshore coral reefs ran for safety before the waters arrived.
Likewise, while the waves uprooted millions of mangroves, they
lost much of their destructive power in the process.
No natural disaster is entirely
natural. With mangrove swamps being uprooted for housing and
tourist development across the tropics, we'll see more and more
unnatural destruction from natural disasters. Likewise, as oppressive
militaries look for advantage in whatever disaster comes their
way, we'll also see unnatural death and destruction in the wake
of supposedly natural death and destruction.
© 2005 Independent
Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
