This section is taken from
Jan Knippers-Black, Development in
Theory and Practice, 2nd Edition, Westview Press, 1999
It presents an excellent overview of some of the critical development problems that face us today, including many that we will discuss in class. Read it to get a sense of the range of problems.
Development and the Gender Gap
Even more than most disciplines and policy areas, that of development
is subject to fads. While in the United States legislation calling for
targeting assistance to the poorest of the poor and paying heed to the
appropriate- ness of technology remained on the books through the 1980s, the
advent of the Reagan administration shifted the focus of consultants and
bureaucrats in short order to the promotion of private enterprise. Meanwhile,
however, the influence of two new categories of pressure groups, feminists and
"greens," was being felt around the world and was being translated by
NGOs, with backing in
particular by the United Nations, into policy agenda.
Thus, beginning in the 1970s and building to a crescendo in the
1990s, the issue of the gender gap, and of the actual and potential roles of
women in development, dominated conferences and symposia, research
proposals and position papers, and came finally to be reflected, at
least in rhetoric, in major donor foreign assistance programs. The United
Nations declared a Decade for Women that closed in 1985 with an international conference in
Kenya. It was followed a decade later by an even larger and more momentous
conference in Beijing.
Getting the Price Wrong
When all else fails, as it
so often does, women around the world somehow summon the strength to raise
their children and sustain their communities. But the price is high.
Most of the world's landless farmers are women. Centuries ago in
much of what is now the Third World—Africa, the South Pacific, and parts of
Europe and Asia—men hunted and made war while women
farmed. There is little game
left to hunt for food; hunting now is mostly for sport. Some might say the same
of war making. At any rate war making has become highly specialized and capital
intensive. But women still
farm. In Africa, for example, 70
percent of the food crops are raised by women. Women, however, are
rarely able to obtain credit in their own names. In cases of divorce,
abandonment, or death, the woman is left with no claim, as title to the land
was held in her husband's name only.
Women normally work longer hours than men. The notorious
"double shift" is not limited to the First World or even to the
industrialized world. Women who farm or produce handicrafts or take on odd jobs
in the informal sector are subject to it, too. A recent survey in Zaire
indicated that men did only 30 percent of the work women did.1 In the
Philippines women were putting in sixty-one hours weekly to men's
forty-one; in Uganda fifty hours compared to twenty-three. Women in North India
were working two to four hours more than men each day in the tea gardens, not
counting time spent on housework and child care.2
Women start working younger—at seven or eight years of age—in the
home or in the fields. A survey in Burkina Faso
showed seven-year-old girls working more than five hours a day, compared
to forty-five minutes for boys of the same age. This means, among other things,
that girls receive less schooling. Sixty percent of the women of the Third
World are literate, compared to 78 percent of the men.3
Women work for less. The global standard for women who earn
wages or salaries has remained remarkably steady through several decades—at
about 60 percent of the earnings of men. In parts of the Third World the gap is
much greater. In Nairobi, Kenya, in the early 1980s, half the working women
earned less than the legal minimum wage, compared to 20 percent of the men.
Women eat less. The same women who work longer hours from an
earlier age and actually produce most of the food must feed the men first. Fathers and male children get priority in
both quality and quantity of food. From
childhood on, women are also less likely to receive medical attention. Thus in much of the Third World,
the female's natural advantage in longevity does not apply. Whereas in the
developed world women had an advantage
of about eight years, in the Third World generally it was only two years; and
in some areas—South Asia, for example— men lived longer.4
But is not modernization
improving the situation of women? Not necessarily.
The Mixed Message of Modernization
Colonial governments
in some respects improved the lot of Third World women. In some places they
were responsible for drawing women into formal education systems. In India, the
British prohibited the practice of
suttee—immolation of the widow on her husband's funeral pyre—and
in parts of Africa and the Middle East, British and other colonial
administrations sought to protect women from such practices as clitorectomy. On the
other hand, in areas where women had decided advantages, the colonial powers brought
gender relations into line with their own male- dominant model. Social
structure in India's Kerala state, for example, was matriarchal and matrilocal until the
British brought practices there into line with those elsewhere in the
empire—supposedly for the sake of administrative "efficiency."5
Higher technology may exacerbate problems rather than solve
them. Despite their doing more of the work (or perhaps because of it?), women have
traditionally been valued less and female infanticide has been practiced
widely. With the spread to the Third World of amniocentesis, the female population is also being diminished by feticide. In India the
proportion of women to men is 927 per 1,000—and dropping. The
devaluation of daughters this reflects is not necessarily a vestige of
traditionalism, likely to be overcome in time by the spread of modernism. It is
in part a product of dowry abuse, wherein the groom's family makes excessive
financial demands of the bride's family. Dowry abuse itself may well be a
product of modernism.
Like so much else in India, abuse of women is a long-standing
tradition. The disturbing and puzzling thing about dowry abuse, however, is
that it is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is most prevalent among the urban
middle class, and it is spreading fast. Registered cases of dowry death, about
1,000 in 1985, were exceeding 5,000 a year in the late 1990s, and those
registered were assumed to be only a small fraction of actual cases.
The dowry system came about,
in Hindu custom, because real property could not be passed to a daughter. As
the daughter would be relocating to her husband's household, she could inherit
only movable goods.
The dowry, then, was simply
the daughter's inheritance, passed to her at the time of her marriage. The
interests of the in-laws were irrelevant to the transaction.
The potential for abuse was officially recognized, however, and
the system was proscribed by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. The act was
almost universally violated, but it was not until the 1970s that accounts of
brides being killed in bizarre accidents, particularly kitchen fires, became so
common as to demand the attention of researchers and law enforcement officials.
The concept of "bride-burning,"
once a reference to the practice of suttee, has since taken on a new
meaning. The real story behind the fatal kitchen fire has all too often turned
out to be that of a husband or mother-in-law spilling kerosene on the bride's
sari and striking a match to it. Along with such "accidents," there
has also been an upsurge in suicides. A great many brides have apparently seen
suicide as their only acceptable escape from the incessant pressure to drain
the livelihood of their parents to satisfy the whims of their in-laws.
Sociologists and others who have studied this trend attribute it in part to the
new materialism or consumerism infecting the middle class. For the bridegroom and his family, marriage
may become a means of acquiring the shiny new toys—stereos, VCRs, motorcycles, even
cars—that they could never afford on their own salaries. And the
extortion may go on long after the wedding, as brides rarely feel that they
have the option of leaving their husbands. It is socially unacceptable for a
bride to return to her parents' household.
Indian women are expected to marry and stay married, and apart from a few
shelters established by charities or women's groups, there are virtually no
alternative living arrangements. Even for female professionals who could afford
to rent their own apartments, there are few landlords who would rent to single
women.
Formerly prevalent only among Hindu middle-class families in the
northern states, dowry demands—and dowry deaths—have spread across lines of
geography, class and caste, and even religion. The practice is now common throughout the country, even
in areas of Moslem or Christian settlement. In a region where women have
traditionally been undervalued, at
least in modern times, the steady inflation of dowry demands has led many
parents to see female offspring as a distinct liability. Thus the dowry system has exacerbated the
problems of female infanticide and, where amniocentesis is available, feticide. It has also contributed to the neglect and
ill-treatment of female children. India is one of
the few countries where women's life expectancy is markedly
shorter than men's.
The only good news with respect to this grim topic is that
recognition of the seriousness of the problem has served to mobilize women.
Indian women are better organized now and more active politically and socially
than they have been at any time since Mahatma Gandhi tapped their energies for the independence movement.6
Other aspects of
modernization also serve to exacerbate inequality between the sexes as well as
between classes. The option of cash cropping, for example, is generally
available only to men. Agricultural development programs, whether of
international or domestic derivation, have been grossly discriminatory
Membership in co-ops and the availability of extension services have often been
restricted to men. Labor-saving devices or technologies passed on by
governments or development agencies are usually passed to men, even where the
labor to which they apply is women's work. Corn grinders have been made
available in Kenya, but women have not been taught to operate them. Likewise
oil presses in Nigeria and tortilla-making machines in Mexico became the
preserve of men, who have access to cash or credit.7 Cash crops then
claim the best land, leaving only the less-fertile and less-accessible
land to women for their food crops. The food crops would have fed the peasant
family. The cash crop is more likely to feed the bartender's family.
We have seen that the introduction of cash cropping often leads
to greater concentration of landownership and to increasing landlessness among
former subsistence farmers. With shrinking plots, the men are forced to
migrate—to seek work in the cities or in more prosperous areas as migratory
farm laborers. Many
never return. This has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of
rural households headed by women. These women, as we have seen, will have even
more difficulty than their husbands did in obtaining credit and technical
assistance and ultimately in holding onto the tiny patches of land left to
them. The spreading feminization of poverty means the juvenilization of poverty, too.
In some areas, such as East Asia, where industrial development
has been largely in the direction of labor intensity and precision work, women
have become very much involved in the formal workforce. In most Third World
areas, however, where factory production has wiped out the market for
handicrafts, the women so displaced are less likely to be hired than men;
women, then, are pushed into the unregulated and
notoriously low-paying
informal sector.
The Burden Shifting of Structural Adjustment
As we have seen, the
long-term trend toward global economic integration, with its accompanying
roller coaster of economic growth and decline, has had the effect, in general,
of widening gaps between rich and
poor countries, between
rural and urban communities, between classes and sectors, and between men and
women. But the social and economic transformations that have accompanied the reabsorption of the Second
and Third Worlds into a
First World-centered
global system have been particularly hard on women.
The economic restructuring that became the condition for credit
first in Latin America and Africa in the 1980s, then in the other parts of the
Third World and in the former Soviet sphere in the early 1990s, and in East and
Southeast Asia in the late 1990s has had the effect of shifting rewards and
resources upward in the social pyramid and outward toward external players
while shifting burdens and responsibilities downward to those having the least
political clout. At the bottom, where the buck stops, one still finds women.
The set of policy changes demanded by private creditors and
multilateral lending institutions, known generally as structural adjustment,
constitutes essentially an adjustment of priorities, so that the needs to be
met first are those of the banks. Government services take a back seat to the
servicing of the debt. As the predominant caregivers—teachers, nurses, social workers—women have been disproportionately disadvantaged by the downsizing
of the public sector. In the Ukraine, for example, some 80 percent of the job
loss of the first half of the 1990s was experienced by women. Loss of public service has not only meant
loss of the best jobs for some women; For women generally it has meant
shouldering more of the burden of service and welfare borne previously in part
by the state.
Meanwhile, in terms of austerity, when men are also losing
jobs and wages are losing value, women have no choice about being breadwinners
if there are jobs to be found. Those jobs, however, are most likely to be in
low-wage, export-processing industries or in the informal sector—in either case
largely beyond the reach of labor unions and labor legislation.
As nongovernmental, nonprofit organizations attempt to fill in
caregiving gaps—assistance for the old, the sick, the hungry who have been
abandoned by the state—women have assumed leadership of that sector. But the
nonprofit sector has scarcely a fraction of the resources previously available
to the state. Women have never lacked responsibility. What they lack now more
than ever in structurally adjusted states is resources.
Implications for Development
What, then, are the implications for development specialists to be
drawn from this assessment? In the first place, targeting the poorest of the
poor (as has been mandated by USAID and by the World Bank, though
practiced only in a token manner) generally means targeting
communi ties in which the role of women is preeminent. It is precisely in the
villages or shantytowns
where conditions are most desperate that women
are most likely to be the economic mainstays as well as the caregivers of their families and the organizational glue of
their communities. This is partly
because men can, and often do, flee from their responsibilities to another place or perhaps just into a bottle.
Women cannot. In the second place,
targeting women, rather than discriminating
against them, benefits the whole family. A number of studies from
disparate parts of the Third World have indicated that compared to men, women
spend a far greater proportion of their incomes on meeting family needs rather
than on personal gratification. Thus, enhancing the income of women means also
raising healthier children, male and female. It is not enough, however, for
women simply to earn the income if it is only to be seized by their husbands.
Women must also be able to maintain control of the income they earn, and in
some areas a step in that direction will call for very considerable education,
consciousness-raising, and social pressure.
In the third place, it is very generally acknowledged that the
population explosion is among the major sources of frustration for development
strategy. General education and the issuance of contraceptive drugs and devices
through family-planning clinics may be, in the absence of major social change,
a very long-term process. More drastic approaches taken to date have even less
to recommend them. In India, the Congress Party suffered a terrible backlash
from its short-lived efforts to impose sterilization. The Chinese government had more success in imposing its
policy of limiting couples to one child but in the process prompted a
sharp rise in female infanticide. The only really effective and morally
acceptable means now known of sharply limiting family size is the education and
liberation, or empowerment, of women.
For women, as for other disadvantaged categories of people, there can be no gains without
political struggle, but the good news is that the struggle has been joined. In
countries that have undergone successful revolution, women have been prominent
among the armed combatants as well as in all other roles essential to the
struggle. That mobilization has subsequently been reflected in involvement in
policy-making and of varying degrees of improvement in status. In the Soviet
Union, women advanced quickly into the professions, becoming particularly
prominent in medicine. Professional status, however, has given them no relief
from the "double shift."
Revolutionary Cuba has actually tried to deal with the double
shift problem. Its path-breaking Family Code, which went into effect in 1975,
specifies that marriage partners are to share equally in child care and in
carrying out household chores.8 Legislation is one thing, of course, implementation
another. In Nicaragua, where one-fourth to one-third of the combatants in the
revolutionary struggle had been women, women's organizations have had a
prominent role in the subsequent transformation of society. Just a few months
after the triumph of the revolution, however, an eighteen-year-old female
military officer told me, with undisguised anger, that male chauvinism had
already reappeared in the Sandinista Armed Forces and the women were being pushed out.
Elsewhere the organization of women in the Third World for the
advancement of their own cause as well as the causes of human rights, child
welfare, and, in general, democracy and social justice has been gathering
momentum at least since the 1960s. In Taiwan, for example, where economic
development has greatly outpaced political development, feminist organizations
have been in the forefront of the campaign for political liberalization.9 Even in South Asia, where most women have traditionally suffered
awful repression and deprivation, some of the most effective national leaders
have been women, and women's organizations have been very active in grass-roots
development as well as in other aspects of political life.
Globally, women have made remarkable progress in electoral
politics at the state level over recent decades, and particularly in the 1990s.
Of the 32 women who have served as presidents or prime ministers during the
twentieth century, 24 were in power during the 1990s. When Mary Robinson left
the presidency of Ireland in 1997 to become the UN high commissioner for human rights,
all four of the major candidates to succeed her in the presidency were
women. Women’s representation in
national legislatures
increased from 7.4 percent in 1975 to 11 percent in 1995, at which time, according to the
Interparliamentary Union, there were only nine countries in the world having no
female representation in their legislatures.10
Women around the world were finding, however, that
participation, even effective
participation, at the national level was not enough if the decisions that so
impact their lives were being made beyond the reach of the state. The convergence of some
thirty-five thousand women on Beijing in 1995 for the Fourth UN conference on women underscored
the recognition that to achieve political change at any level women must
be organized and mobilized at all
levels—from the local to the global. At that and other global meetings, leaders of the
women's movement have also made
it clear that their agenda is not simply about women's needs but rather about
human needs. To the extent that the movement is able to sensitize and mobilize
previously nonparticipant populations, it should have a democratizing effect
on society in general.
Notes
1. Paul Harrison, Inside the Third World: The Anatomy of Poverty, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 441.
2. Tony Bamett, Social and Economic Development: An Introduction
(New York: Guilford Press, 1989), pp. 168-169.
3. United Nations Development Program [UNDP], Human Development Report 1997 (New
York: UNDP, 1997), p. 151.
4. Harrison, op. cit., pp. 444-446.
5. Discussions with Sarah Matthew, director of women's programs. Institute for
Development Education, Madras, June-July and October-November 1988.
6. While on a Fulbright-funded research program in India in 1998, this author had
occasion to meet with leaders of several women's organizations that were
dealing with the dowry-abuse problem and to become acquainted with the family
of a recent dowry-abuse victim.
7. Bamett, op. cit., pp. 157-158.
8. For more information on Cuba's family code and on the role of
women in revolutionary Cuba, see Chapter 5 in Jan Knippers Black, ed.. Area Handbook for Cuba (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1976). See also several books by Margaret Randall, including Cuban
Women Now (Toronto: Women's Press, 1974) and Lois Smith and Fred Padula, Sex and
Revolution in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996).
9. Feminist leaders and organizations have been in the vanguard
of the democratic movement at least since the flourishing of Formosa
magazine in the late 1970s. Feminist leaders, including Lu Hsui-lien and Chen Chu, were sentenced to prison when the movement was
crushed following the Kaohsiung rally in 1979. The author was able to meet with
leaders of the once-again flourishing feminist movement in Taipei in 1988,1994, and
1995. Lu was elected to the Taiwanese Senate in 1993 and was elected magistrate of
Taoyuan County in 1997.
10. Jane S. Jacquette, "Women in
Power: From Tokenism to Critical Mass " For eign Policy 108, fall 1997, pp.
23-37.
11. Amat Al-Aleem Assooswa, undersecretary of information of the Republic of
Yemen, the highest-ranking woman in that government, told this author that the issue of sending a
delegation of Yemeni women to the Beijing Conference proved a highly controversial one, which
in itself proved beneficial to the movement for women's rights. Debates about
whether or not to send a delegation ulti-
mately engaged women who had never previously enjoyed a public
forum and opened up for discussion the broader issue of women's participation
in public affairs.
Interview at the Ministry of Information, Sana'a, July 3,1998.
Suggested
Readings
Boserup,
E., Woman's
Role in Economic Development (London: AUen and Unwin, Chatty, Dawn, and Annika Rabo, eds.. Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women s Groups in the
Middle East (Oxford: Berg Press, 1997)
Daritetelan;Irene' and Joan Davidson' wom^ and the Environment in the Third World: Alliance for the Future
(London: Earthscan
Publications Ltd., 1988)
Deere,
Carmen Diana, and Magdalena Leon, Rural Women and State Policy Feminist Perspectives on
Latin American Agricultural Development (Boulder: Westview Press,
1987).
Eisler,
Riane, The
Chalice and the Blade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harper and Row 1987)
Eisler,
Riane, David Loye, and Kari Norgaard, Women, Men and
the Global Quality of Life (Pacific Grove, CA: The Center for Partnership Studies 1995)
Jacquette, Jane, Trying Democracy: Women in Post-Authoritarian
Politics in Latin America'and Central and
Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press/1998).
Kardam, Nuket, Bringing Women
In: Women's Issues in International Development Programs
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers 1991)
^don^looTs^? Empowerment: ^Wion and Decision-Making
(Lon
Scott,
Catherine V., Gender
and Development: Rethinking Modernization and Develop ment theory (Boulder:
Lynne Rienner Publishers 1996)
Summerfield, Gale and Jiyang Howard, Women and Economic Reform in China
(London: Routledge,
forthcoming).
Tinker,
I., and M. Bramsen, Women and World
Development (Washington D C • Overseas
Development Council, 1976)
"^emberTi^? of the Fourth world conference on wom^" Beijing, ^S^^DP1^ program [UNDPL Human DeveloPfnent ^ 1995
Waylen, Georgina, Gender in Third World Politics (Buckingham, UK: Open
University
Press, 1996).
The Fragile Ecology of Mother Earth
Trends
in donor policies have always had more to do with First World politics than
with Third World needs. Policies and programs serving trade and investment
interests have been fairly consistent and have constantly enjoyed a high
priority. Other programs, however, have been subject to the wide pendulum
swings of foreign policy that reflect a major cleavage in Western, particularly
U.S., society. Aspects of policy subject to the pendulum swing—from security
interests, for example, to humanitarian interests—may be more nearly expressive
than instrumental, designed more for their repercussions in the First World
than in the Third.
Intended or not, however,
repercussions in the Third may be very great indeed. Major donors have
generally been unreceptive to Third World solicitations and initiatives,
viewing them as threatening to the established order (that is, the order
favoring major donors).
Benchmark studies of Third World needs and of foreign assistance
efforts and their consequences commissioned by the U.S. Congress or the
executive branch over the years (i.e., the Rostow Commission study of 1957 or the Carlucci Commission report
of 1983)1 have
generally served to legitimate trends already under way rather than to
launch new ones. Some developments have been traceable in part, however, to nonofficial
studies, and even to particular books, although such cases have usually
involved long periods of gestation. The appropriate technology trend of the
1970s, which survives into the 1990s in the work of NGOs/PVOs de spite diminished interest among major donors,
owes much to Ernst F.
Schumacher's book. Small Is Beautiful (1973), as the environmentalist
concerns so prominent in the 1990s are traceable to Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring (1962).2
The environmentalist perspective, centering on respect for and
protection of the natural, of life in all its abundant forms, as opposed to the
artificial—the forms and products and transformations wrought by
technology and commerce that consume and overwhelm nature—has
maintained soft margins, expanding its range as new concerns are
identified. Thus it has drawn very
broad support, steadily gaining adherents
since
the 1960s. By the 1990s, there was hardly an agency or organization having
anything to do with development that did not have a division or committee
dealing with the environment, and the reorientation of academics, consultants, and even politicians
served to build momentum.
Exporting Garbage
In development studies, as in other areas of public discourse, the
bandwagon of the 1990s proved to be the garbage truck. One of the many un
fortunate consequences of success in the post-World War II drive for
rapid industrialization and unlimited production is the generation
on a massive scale of waste. Even within the United States, the issue of
dumping has aroused regional antagonisms as the more-industrialized North-
east and Midwest shop around in the South and West for communities
desperate enough to take in their garbage for a few
dollars or a few jobs.3
And as other local and state governments attempt to protect their
constituencies, the difficulty of finding legal means of and locales for
dumping makes the waste management industry particularly attractive to
organized-crime syndicates.
Nor is the scourge of waste confined to the countries where it
is produced. Like other by-products of the industrial age, it slips easily over
national borders, becoming a source of friction among neighboring
states. U.S. businesses and municipalities, facing ever-higher
disposal costs in the United States, are shipping great quantities of waste to
Mexico, Central
America, and the Caribbean.
The problem would be serious enough if the foul stuff in search
of an eternal resting place were
relatively benign household waste. Much of it, however, is hazardous industrial
waste, and some—the radioactive waste of weapons and power plants, for
example—is extremely lethal, posing to air, soil, and groundwater long-term threats that we have only begun to
fathom. Furthermore, the more toxic the waste, the more likely that the
producers will seek to dispose of it on someone else's turf and that the dangers it poses will be
understated. As the private transnational organization Greenpeace has gone to great lengths to dramatize, a great deal
of the world's hazardous waste is being dumped in the oceans; this serves to blunt
the jurisdictional
and liability disputes so often associated with disposal, but it does
not prevent the generalized contamination of the world's food chain.
The by-products of industrial development that are not dumped en
masse as garbage may be doing even more damage. Hazardous chemical compounds
are constantly being released into the air or filtering into
rivers, streams, and
aquifers. Particles from one such set of compounds, chlorofluorocarbons, have made their way to the protective ozone layer and
eaten a hole in it, threatening higher rates of skin cancer, among
other dire consequences. (This threat was viewed as serious enough to
inspire a superpower treaty, signed by Bush and Gorbachev in 1989, to limit the production of chlorofluorocarbons.)
Meanwhile the cutting and burning of forests and the consumption
of fossil fuels release carbon dioxide, which traps solar radiation near the
earth's surface. The resulting global warming, the "greenhouse effect,"
could raise sea levels,
inundating coastal cities and swallowing up entire islands. The Worldwatch Institute's
annual State of the World reported in early 1989 that the five
warmest years of this century had been in the
1980s. About 40 percent of
this greenhouse effect is attributable to fossil fuel combustion. The United
States alone contributes one-fifth of the carbon being added annually to the
atmosphere, a consequence in large part
of its energy-inefficient
transportation system; the average car adds its own weight in carbon to the
atmosphere each year. U.S. emissions alone increased by more that 1 percent
annually between 1990 and 1998. Some such increases might be attributed to the
U.S. economic boom of the 1990s, but pollution levels rose faster in 1996 than
did economic output or energy consumption.
Also contributing to the
imbalance of carbon and oxygen in our atmosphere has been the rapid depletion
of the planet's rain forests. Tropical ecosystems around the world are
currently being destroyed at the rate of 25 million acres a year. By 1992,
according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, two-thirds of the world's forests
had already been lost.
Much has been written about the clearing of the Amazon Basin.
One-fourth of Brazil's forestry reserves had been cut down by 1974. In 1988 the
country lost an area of tropical rain forest larger than Switzerland.
That same year, an
indigenous crusader against deforestation, Francisco (Chico) Mendes, was murdered by cattle ranchers. But the problem of deforestation,
with consequent topsoil
erosion, upland desertification, and
downstream flooding, is of
global scope. Papua New Guinea, among the last of the world's region's to be
explored and exploited by nonnatives, has about
145,000 square miles of tropical forests. But given that the
amount of wood exported
annually has more than quadrupled since 1980, local environmentalists estimate
that at current rates of depletion, forests of commercial value will be gone by
2020.
The loss of fertile soil, in turn, takes its toll on food
production. For the world as a whole, per capita food production in the late
1990s had gained over the levels of the 1970s, but in the least developed
countries it had fallen behind, and "food security" had become a
major concern. There is no doubt that loss of productive farmland, through
industrial and urban development on the one hand and erosion on the other, is
one of the several factors leading so many countries to import more and more of
their basic foodstuffs.
Sharing Hardships
What does all of this have to do with development?
To the extent that development is measured in production and consumption
without regard to ecological balance and replenishment, it has everything to do
with it. Such development must be seen, along with population growth, as the
engine of this ecological crisis; and the crisis offers an intimation of the
limits of the process. Furthermore, wherever there are hardships to be shared,
the poor get more than their share of them. In an internal memo leaked from the
World Bank in 1992, the Bank's chief economist, Laurence Summers, applying
cost-benefit analysis, (perhaps ironically) said, "I think the economic
logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is
impeccable, and we should face up to that."4
As the ecological crisis is global, its effects are felt more
immediately and more sharply in the Third World. In the first place, much of
the Third World is urbanized, if not highly industrialized; it is urbanizing at
a faster rate than the First World, and its municipalities are less well
equipped to deal with the consequences of such concentration. Sewerage systems, for example, are almost
everywhere inadequate. In Sao Paulo, a modern city of more than 16 million, less than
half the sewage is even collected, and of that less than 5 percent is
treated. In the heart of Madras or Mexico City, Santiago or Seoul, Bangkok or
Jakarta, breathing is a struggle. In some cities, cement plants and petroleum-
refining facilities throw off dust and sulfur. m others, mineral- and chemical-processing plants put
arsenic and other toxic compounds into the air.
In almost every major city,
excepting a very few essentially nonmotorized ones
like Phnom Perm and
Dacca, motor vehicle pollutants, especially diesel fuel, routinely cause sore eyes and throats, chronic
coughing and
shortness of breath, and
apparently increase the incidence of lung cancer. Illnesses caused by polluted water and air must be discounted
against the gains attributable to modern medicine and health-care-delivery systems.
It is estimated that 40 million tons of hazardous industrial
waste are produced in Latin America each year. For better or worse, as capital
circles the globe seeking cheap land and labor, the Third World is rapidly
acquiring more industry, with its attendant liabilities. Whether the fault lies
with weak or corrupt host governments or with greedy foreign investors, the
precautions against ordinary pollution or against ecological disaster that are
less than adequate in the First World are even less adequate in the Third. The
kind of accident that devastated Bhopal, India, might well threaten Union Carbide's U.S. plants also, and the 1989
Exxon oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound exposed the weaknesses
of U.S. regulatory systems; but the
fact remains that preventable industrial contamination is even more common in
the Third World than in the First.
If the Third World suffers more than the First from environmental
degradation, it is in part because First World companies use it as a dumping
ground for products they are prohibited from marketing at home Pesticides, in
increasingly common use with the spread of plantation-style export agriculture,
have been among those
products. They are likely to come home to roost, as residues on the
fruits and vegetables shipped back to the First World. But the price to Third
World field laborers, blanketed regularly in the stuff by crop dusters, is much
greater; they have been suffering in ever-larger numbers from pesticide
poisoning. In El Salvador, for example, during the 1970s, 1,000 to 2,000 cases
of pesticide poisoning were reported annually in 1987, 50 children died of it in a single hospital in San Salvador.5 In several Amazonian villages in the
late 1990s, where miners had used mercury in panning rivers for gold,
most of the children tested showed levels of mercury contamination (in hair
samples) well above those considered to be tolerable by the World Health
Organization.6
The loss of vegetation and of fertile land ultimately affects us
all. But as in the case of most life-and-death struggles, the affluent are not likely to be found
on the front lines. The peoples most devastated are the ones who were trying to
scratch out a living on land that was already marginal. The first victims of
desertification are the nomads around the edges of the Sahara and Kalahari
deserts. The first to suffer from erosion are the subsistence farmers on
Haiti's already severely eroded hillsides.
Deforestation has disturbing
implications for the planet in general. It is estimated that one-fourth of the oxygen in
our atmosphere derives from the Amazonian rain forest alone. But for the
poor of many Third World countries, the
retreat of the trees poses more immediate hardship. The FAO estimates that 86 percent of the
wood cut in the Third World is used for fuel. Wood is an inefficient fuel, but for many there is no
affordable alternative. As firewood has dwindled in south and central India,
"power
packs" of cow dung must be used for heating and cooking, but
that leaves little to be used as
fertilizer. It is estimated that more nitrogen and phosphorous from power packs
goes up in smoke than the total Indian
production of chemical fertilizer.
The foothills of the Himalayas, particularly in eastern Nepal
and in northeast India, are being
deforested at an alarming rate. For the wood
gatherers, usually women, this means that the hike in search of firewood
takes them farther each year from their villages. Population pressure is partly to blame, but the locals have also
sometimes found themselves in competition with major lumber companies.
In one such case, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the people decided to fight back. The Chipko movement, or
"tree huggers," as they came to be known, mostly women, vowed to
hug the trees so that the lumber
companies could not fell them without felling the villagers with them. Similar, more or less spontaneous
grass-roots movements representing a coincidence of popular and environmental interests, and
building upon the Gandhian tradition of nonviolent activism, sprouted else where in India in the 1980s, but few
have been as successful as the tree huggers, who actually forced the lumber company out of their
forests.7
Another major threat to forest and farmland alike in the Third
World has been the relentless spread of large-scale infrastructure projects.
Undertaken in the name of development, sponsored by governments, underwritten
by loans from the World Bank and the regional development banks, such projects
have included roads, railroads, ports, power lines, and, in particular, massive
dams. The clearest beneficiaries of these projects, who have mounted impressive
lobbying efforts, have been First World or transnational construction
companies.
The most immediate losers from these infrastructure operations
have generally been indigenous peasants. Such indigenous peoples, generally
occupying remote valleys or jungle clearings on the frontier of settlement, may
be unintegrated into
the national community and utterly lacking in political clout, but they
are the vestiges of expertise in ecological balance. The resettlement promised
to Mexico's Chinantec
and Brazil's Kayapo Indians when plans were drawn up in the late 1980s to
construct dams flooding their ancestral lands came as scant
compensation. Both groups resisted and two of the Kayapo chiefs were brought to
trial under Brazil's Foreign Sedition Act. Ironically, it was for urging a role
for local
populations in designing the
policies that affect them that the Kayapo's chiefs
were tried, along with a U.S. anthropologist—under a law forbidding foreign
interference in Brazilian affairs.8
In the late 1990s, a new spurt of growth in the Brazilian economy
was inspiring a wave of large-scale infrastructure projects in the Amazon.
Underwritten by multinational agencies as well as by U.S., European, and Asian
investment banks, the industrial waterways, railways, roads, and oil and gas
pipelines are expected to provide Brazil new export corridors to the Pacific,
Caribbean, and North Atlantic coasts. Plans include also ten new hydroelectric
dams to provide energy mainly for the expansion of mining operations. Most of
this new development is taking place without environmental impact studies or
consultation with indigenous groups or political debate in the larger community
on the costs and benefits of such projects.9
Questions
of Equity and Responsibility
An environmental perspective raises fundamental ethical questions
about equity and responsibility—about assessing blame and liability, about the
setting of priorities, and about the merits and the urgency of
competing claims on scarce resources—that are not necessarily set
in relief by other perspectives.
Some of these questions pit the First
World against the Third: Is it fair or reasonable for the overdeveloped nations
to demand of the underdeveloped ones that they forgo certain practices, now
seen as detrimental to the global environment, that were crucial to First World
development? Should certain of the LDCs choose to forgo such practices, are they entitled
to extra assistance to compensate for possible losses in growth or
productivity? When it is clear that First World practices are responsible for
environmental degradation affecting the Third World, should the responsible
countries and companies be held liable in the sense of owing compensation? If
environmental degradation threatens us all, do nonnationals have an inherent right to influence the practices of
particular countries? If, as is argued, all life on the planet is
dependent on the oxygen produced by the Amazon rain forest, should nonnationals be able to pressure
the Brazilian government to drop incentives to clearance? If so, perhaps nonnuclear nations
threatened by radioactive waste should have a voice in the weapons and
power development policies of countries having nuclear capabilities.
As to questions of priority and urgency, many in the development
community will have no trouble deciding, in principle, which has the prior
claim when the interests of profit are pitted against the interest of
environmental preservation. But what about the equally common circumstances
that pit the interests of Mother Nature against the interests of clearly needy
local populations? Where do justice and reasonableness lie when the urgent
needs of large numbers of poor people run counter to those of endangered plant
and animal species and, more important, to small numbers of people representing
endangered cultures?
Perhaps the most important conflict of interests with respect to
environmental issues, however, lies between old and young, or between
generations now seeking succor from this planet and generations to which they
will leave what's left of it. In this contest, future generations are at a
terrible disadvantage: They have no weapons and no vote.
It would be unrealistic to imagine that the great debates about
environmental issues, whether they take place at the summit or on the street
corner, will have any more influence on the actual allocation or reallocation of resources than have earlier debates
on technology and change, the terms of trade, the energy crisis, the income
gap, and the gender gap. But we must hope that there is something to be gained
through increased awareness of what is at stake.
On April 22,1990, the
twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day was celebrated in thousands of
towns and cities across the United States and around the world. Whereas the
first Earth Day, brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, had been in essence a counterculture event, that of
1990 was a mainstream spectacular; speakers were the biggest names in
government and show business, and underwriters included the biggest transnational corporations and
conglomerates, including some of the most notorious polluters. At the largest
rallies, there was no need for those in attendance even to pick up their own
litter; clean-up crews had been hired. For environmentalists, the mainstreaming of the issue
represented a major victory of sorts; but some aging hippies were uneasy
about being sidelined as spectators while the foxes ceremoniously assumed guardianship of the
chicken coop.
Flunking the Millennial
Review
The spread of environmental consciousness in the
1990s, as of organization and mobilization, has been phenomenal. And there have
been some impressive victories along the way. Just over a decade after French
intelligence officers sank its flagship. Rainbow Warrior, in the harbor at Auckland,
New Zealand, Greenpeace, still shadowing French war ships in the South Pacific, saw the
French government back away in 1996 from planned tests and sign the South
Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. The organization had also been highly
successful in protecting whales, dolphins, seals, and other sea creatures and
was engaged in campaigns against all manner of polluters on land and sea.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace had grown from some 1.5 million contributing members to 5
million with affiliates in thirty-two countries.
A milestone of activism and optimism for environmentalists and other nongovernmental, nonprofit organizations was the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
The conference—known as ECO '92—proved to be the largest gathering of world
leaders up to that point in history, with more than one hundred heads of state
in attendance. Even so, the official conference was probably less significant
than the NGO forum
that met simultaneously, with activists converging from all parts of the
world to bring pressure to bear on their government delegations. The basic
document of the conference, an agreement that became known as Agenda 21,
encapsulated UNCED commitments with respect to clean air and water and
preservation of forests, wetlands, species, and other essential ingredients of
the material environment. It also recognized an antipoverty strategy as a basic condition for ensuring sustainable development.
But the despoilers of ecosystems, particularly in the private sector, have
proliferated and grown stronger and hungrier. Twenty-first-century
technology and post-Cold War politics had made resources that were
once remote or protected
readily accessible. And governments harnessed to debt servicing schedules had
had to accelerate exportation to earn foreign exchange. They were in no
position to resist the pollution of their air
and water, the erosion of
their soil, or the exploitation of their natural resources.
Delegates gathering at the United Nations in New York
City in June 1997 for Rio Plus Five, the second world environment summit, a
follow-up to ECO '92, found the general mood
to be a grim one. Virtually every target that had been set in Rio de Janeiro had been missed,
and most of the problematic trends identified in 1992 had accelerated.
Logging firms had plundered forests everywhere almost at will,
resulting in the extinction, just since 1992, of more than 130,000 species.
Even as the forests that might have absorbed some of the carbon dioxide were
being destroyed, emissions, both from motor vehicles in the First World and
dirty industry in the Third, were increasing.
Pollution and diversion of water have become major concerns. One-
fifth of the world's
population lacked access to potable water in 1995, and in the poorest countries
90 percent of urban sewage is dumped untreated into rivers, lakes, and oceans.
Fish stocks are dwindling, threatened by
pollution as well as overfishing.
The greatest failing in the follow-up to ECO '92, however, was found to have
been the neglect of the planet's human resources—the failure to recognize and
act upon the intrinsic relationship between human nd environmental poverty.
Bankrupt governments, for example, are unable to follow through on treaty
commitments, as they are unable to resist the propositions of investors.
The United Nations Development Program reported in 1997 that the
poorest 20 percent of the world population, which in 1960 received 2.3 percent
of global income, now receives only 1.1 percent. And even as gaps widen, the
rich nations that had promised in 1992 to increase aid for sustainable development had
in fact cut such aid by 20 percent, from 0.33 percent of GDP to 0.27 percent.
One of the most important
documentary outcomes of ECO '92 was a treaty, ratified by 159 states, designed to
reduce pollution from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in order to
ward off major global climate change—the so-called greenhouse effect that
occurs as pollution in the atmosphere traps solar radiation. The industrialized
states agreed in the 1992 treaty to reduce and stabilize their emission of
greenhouse gases by the year 2000 at the levels that prevailed in 1990. It
appeared that very few were likely to
meet that goal. A report produced for the World Energy Council, an independent
research group based in London, found that carbon dioxide emissions, largely
from the burning of fossil fuels, rose 12 percent between 1990 and 1995.
Climate change, or
"global warming”
continued to be among the major concerns of environmentalists throughout
the 1990s. International conferences on the topic took place in Berlin in 1995
and in Geneva in
1996. But goals that were
set were repeatedly missed. The UN conference scheduled for Kyoto in December
1997 was widely seen as something of a last-ditch effort. If the damaging trends could not be deescalated at this point,
it might be too late for many low-lying regions to avoid inundation. When the
delegates from 160 countries gathered to draw up a treaty, alone with the
thousands of environmentalists in attendance, more than eight hundred
registered industrial lobbyists were on hand to plot derailment. To many of the
dedicated environmentalists, this conference produced little more than another
inning in the North-South blame game.
Third World leaders were scarcely receptive to U.S. calls for
carbon emissions targets; they considered such targeting on their part to be
premature, to say the least, until rich countries started cutting their own
emissions and pledged to
help finance improved technologies in poorer countries. The richer countries by
no means put up a united front. And though few bodies drifted to the surface,
the battle raged on within some
governments, including that
of the United States.
The European Union sought fairly stringent controls, whereas the
United States proposed to stabilize emissions at 1990 levels. But as U.S.
levels had already risen by 8 percent since 1990, many were skeptical of the
feasibility even of that proposal. Ultimately, the United States signed on to
an agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to about 7 percent below
1990 levels by 2012, but to achieve that only through market incentives rather
than government regulation. The Democratic administration's treaty was not
likely under any circumstances to receive serious consideration by the
Republican Congress. Earlier in the year, the
Senate had unanimously passed a resolution to the effect that it
would not ratify a treaty reducing U.S.
emissions targets until developing countries agreed to cut theirs.
Assessments of what was accomplished by the conference varied
greatly. But that of Mother Nature was unequivocal. She weighed in with her own
commentary in early 1998, as El Nino storms—generated by extraordinarily warm ocean
currents—relentlessly pounded the Western Hemisphere for months. For the world
as a whole 1998 turned out to be the hottest year on record.
Notes
U. S. House of
Representatives, 101st Congress, 1st Session, Committee
on Foreign Affairs, Background Materials on Foreign Assistance, Report of the Task Force on
Foreign Assistance, February 1989 (Washington DC: GPO 1989), pp. 257-259.
2. See Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study a/Economics As If People Mattered (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973); and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
3. Likewise, peddling
the same "economic development" incentives, private- sector prison management companies like the
Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America were approaching the same
depressed and desperate communities in search of dumping sites for people.
There were more than 1,000,000 inmates
in U.S. federal and state prisons in 1999 and, like material waste manage-
ment, people waste management continued to be a growth industry.
4. Doug
Henwood,
"Toxic Banking," The Nation, March 2,1992, p. 257.
5. See Tom Barry, El Salvador: A Country Profile
(Albuquerque: Resource Center, 1989).
6. David Cleary, "Mercury Contamination in the Amazon Basin: Problems
and Solutions," seminar
presented at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, October 14,1997.
7. Discussions with D. K. Oza, a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service,
who had done extensive studies on spontaneous grass-roots organization and the
influence of Gandhi,
Madras, June-July
and November 1988.
8. Alexander Cockbum, "Killing Cultures," Nation 247, no. 13, November 7 1988, pp. 446-447.
9. Anthony Hall, International Advisory Group of the G7 Pilot
Programme to Conserve the Rainforest, Comments at "Brazil: Toward the 21st
Century," Inaugural Conference of Oxford University's Center for Brazilian
Studies, December 8-9,1997.
Suggested
Readings
Brown, Lester, Christopher Flavin, and Hal Kane, Vital Signs, 1996: The Trends
That Are Shaping Our
Future (New York: W. W. Norton/Worldwatch
Institute, 1996).
Brown, Lester R., et al., eds.. State of the World
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co 1986).
Brundtland, Gro Harlem, chairperson. Our Common Future (New York: Oxford