KB/Xtending the CP Discourse
June 2005
(1)
MAKE PROPER USE OF LAND
Web Posted - Wed Jun 01 2005
in Barbados Advocate June 02 2005
By Allison Ramsay
The areas of food security and food, which includes the region's high food bill, poverty alleviation in rural areas and the management of land and water in a sustainable manner, are of serious concern for the CARICOM region.
As a result of this, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has strategically identified these areas to be its prime focus for the Caribbean/ CARICOM region. (NOTE: a PDF file of the FAO report on Barbados is here.)
With approximately two billion people [world-wide] already affected by land degradation, the issue of sustainable land management is one, which affects all CARICOM member states.
Land degradation is one of the root causes of declining agricultural productivity in all countries of the world. If it is left uncontrolled, it will exacerbate the problems of food insecurity.
According to Director of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, Dr. Barbara Graham, land degradation also contributes to poverty, loss of income in rural areas, and to some of the devastation as a consequence of natural disasters.
Dr. Graham, who was delivering the feature address at the opening ceremony held at the
Pommarine Hotel, Hastings [Barbados] recently, for the Extended task force meeting of participating agencies and Latin American countries (LAC) for enhancing South-South co-operation between LAC-Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS), said that Sustainable Land Management is arguably the single most important measure to control and reverse this trend.
'Proper land use improves fresh water resource management, food production and the creative use of bio-diversity, as well as livelihoods in rural areas', she explained. The FAO Director said that the meeting and Partnership Initiative is important and central to how Caribbean countries move forward.' Whether it be agri-foods, tourism or financial services, regardless of the mix, how we use our land and water resources including our bio- diversity will be critical to any growth and development of Member States.
She added that sustainable land, water and bio-diversity management holds the key for the type, quality and pace of development, as it relates to our goods and our main service industry, tourism.
However, it is recognised that the real challenge is how to adopt a policy or strategy option that is measurable in outcome [!!] and is not only conservation and preservation oriented.
Also, smaller economies such as those of the region have special concerns because the extent of their resources allow them less flexibility and less[?/surely this shd be <more>] manipulation.
The FAO Director noted some of the issues facing Member States. These include youth unemployment, HIV/AIDS, vulnerability to natural disasters, the indebtedness of the countries in the region which relates to poor investment climate made worse in many countries because of crime, in addition to the loss of trained human resources.
[if she said this, she certainly left out plenty! - we shd try get hold of her actual verbatim or written version of her remarks. The FAO - and all these agencies have a grave role to play in our development and is essential that their impartiality vis/vis the various Govts they work with, be monitored and assured - and therefore we must discriminate among what's reported as said (as here) and what was actually said - in full con/tex. It's one reason why I deplore the development in the main-man media throughout the world to go in for plotted plants rather than growing trees [KB5/London 2 June 2005]
In her remarks, Dr. Graham also spoke of the numerous successful activities that the FAO, in collaboration with other entities such as IICA, CDB, GM of the UNCCD, the German Technical Co-operation, UNEP Regional Office and the CARICOM Secretariat, has done in the Caribbean.
(2)
2 June 05
Good Morning Tom, shd have reply you yesterday 1 June, but decided to sleep on it. It's about Alex clip from the Advocate - their reprint of the FAO Caribbean Dir on Land Management [see #1, above] and how it's - our LANN - is bein sacrifice to Tourism. This isn't new, its OBVIOUS, and there's been discussion of it in the Caribbean - but (as usual/our problem) spasmodic and above all uncoordinated, so that our Govts and their Alliance Outlets, whose 'Business is Tourism', continue to command the heights +depths of this discourse and 'idea' and in praxis, so that the loss/destruction of good arable Caribbean land continues apace - first for Tourism - hotels, now villas and golfcourses and - by xtension - ?popular what I call GAZEBOS - entertainment centres & spaces & sequences - anything fancy - that might spruce up our islands (windmills into glitzy artshops for instance), giving them/us! a kind of Walt Disney-like even neverNeverland xoticism (tho if course there have been some serious & nativist-enhancing 'adaptations' (like the use of Barbados' Farley Hill - the Great House itself destroyed by fire some years ago - as a public garden and entertainment space - and - at least once so far - the ruins - indeed reconstructed by Hollywood - for a well-known movie. And Jamaica for sure, has done dignity to Port Royal (tho not yet Spanish Town) and people will tell you that the balance in Willemsted (Curaçao), Christiansted & Charlotte Amalie in the US Virgin Islands is just about even between what is 'there' and what is 'imaged' - tho tourism here, as throughout the Caribbean, is more than clearly winning the GAZEBO battel
And where is most damaging - dangerous & deVastating - life-& future-destroying in fact - is in the agricultural and lebensraum sector. In physically 'small' tourist 'destinations'(!) like Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, the Dutch antilles and now increasingly in Barbados, all the local 'industry'/production has gone - sugar, nutmeg, cotton, coffee, (the attack on it at first justified as 'slave/plantation biz' and therefore worthy of memory(!) and actual eradication. And gone to be replaced by the concrete & profits of tourism and its new connecting offshoot(s) - the local building bloom. In Barbados, local (white) entrepreneurs - a feature of much of our postIndependence being that is the scions of the white plantation that continue to make/control our money - allied w/British and now North American multinationals - so that - to return to Bdos - local builders like 'COW' Williams woruk alongside multinationals like Rayside (see Tom's website for Rayside) and often in alliance with each other - hotly denide of course - and are churning up the islands to build huge tourist hotels and now hotel compleXes (kingdoms w/in our continuing colonies), swamping of course the 'small hotel' effort which had made a brief optimistic appearance at the time of our Independencies, and eating up the landscape - to be joined (& connected of course) by malls, supermarkets, art&craft villages, villas (the permanent certainly owned residence of tourists/visitors/settlers - re/introducing alas the white settler racist & xploitation mentality which has been a feature of Western EuroAmerican mercantilism from the time of the DoveTears of Columbus; and we now have the BLACK &/or NATIVE IMITATION of all this, in the amazing growth of the neoGreat Houses - huge mainly Wuthering Heights-like structures (what else) - things up to 12 warehouse-shape rooms inc jacuzzi and swimmming pool(s) - the mystery here being where does our struggeling deopendent client economonotomy find the spondulets to quip & acquire such ghastly magnificence - eating the land again of course - so that in alliance w/the BUILDERS we now have DEVELOPERS (in our small socialeconomies the same people really) who scout & scour the land, buying up collapsing plantations (inc banana areas now since NAFTA and Chiquita (good ole United Fruit)*cripple our last ?viable possibility
*[see Chiquita in #3, below - all these issues - Tourism, Land Use, the PR Model of 'Industrialization', Caribbean Sovereignty, Human Rights, Doctor vs People Politics etc, use to be discuss in the pages of New World Quarterly and later Tapia and the TTR - Beckford, Girvan, Best, Manley, Perkins, Thomas, Rodney, Patterson, Jefferson, Wynter, Lamming among others/see also my L/X - but all these have disappeared from vu and in anycase nvr properly became part of Caribbean public consciousness anyway, so that now -at this (new) mo of Crisis, we don't have these shd-be ANCESTORS to learn from, give support - another cruel axis is our so-call culture which we continue to ignore to our shame and our peril xistence. each generation continuing to trynvent tinvent reinvent our wobbly imperfection wheel]
In the 70s, in response to this, the Bajan NL poet Bruce St John, made joke saying that after they take all our 'beach-front' land (as they've now done) we'll have to 'take to the hills' - but 'capitalism' has got there before us [note how to even conduct discourse on this simple talk-to-talk level, one constantly encounters all the loaded political/ideological terms - 'black/, white, 'race', 'plantation', 'capitalism', 'colonialism' etc etc etc - which of course as soon as they are used - even in inverted commas as I tend to do here - rise up a whole academy of academic and rum-shop discussion > you, so that io can hardly proceed, tripped up by footnotes and roadblocks of refs - which is why I askin for a different kind of xtenuating discourse, based on NL and sycoraX - whe we can talk to each other in the native (Caliban) signs & signals we all understann - 'roasbreadfruit' rather than Hegel & Freud & the Seven Types of Ambiguity - take the talk whe our mothers can understand it - those, that is, who have not yet already (as many now are) inna the very Academy this internet is tryin to reform
What I'm saying here is that by the mid 90s, the very monkey hills that Bruce St John still felt in the 70s we cd hinterland, have become the prime moneyhill hunterlands for Tourism and what I can only call BND - Bogus Native Development - 'evvabody' gone to the heights - as the bushas had done in the days of slavery . So with the tree cover gone up there (and look at Haiti - doin it, for opposite reasons, from the ground up), we now have drought & more drought, more & severe hurricanes (if you know what I mean) and less & less water sources - so pollution, and (in case of Barbados) also falling drying dying water-tables, corruption of the very coral from which we speak; more & more IMPORTED water, more & more imported FOOD, and since we are what we eat, more and more imported ZOMBIES - leading to the VANDAL breakthru I start writin about since TTR and PIXIE and now CP
My submission here is that we have to CONNECT (CONNX) ALL THESE THINGS - ideas and dreams and themes. Is no use reading that FAO piece on Land Management if we don't connect it w/the Edward Cumberbatch 'Talk-yuh-Talk Agriculture' and if Edward Cumberbatch 'Talk-yuh-Talk Agriculture' don't - won't, as far as it can, connect dem palava wid hwat we signifyin from CowPasture+CowPastor. All these Reports and Five-Year Plans for the Development not even of culture but of culture INDUSTRIES - all oxymorons anyway - if they don’t connect w/the NEGLECT of Heritage that we now summonin up on Tom Raworth's website http:/tomraworth.com/wordpress/
If the UWI and Centre for Caribbean Thought, the annual conference on Walter Rodney in Guyana, the Geo Padmore Centre in London, the CLR in TT - if nun a dese - and all these conferences we always havin (Human Rights and the rapes & kidnappings, the poverty & continuing dispossession as on CP - (why is it that NO Jamaican evva discuss DW's Star-apple kingdom or TTR; NO Bajan say a woerd about PIXIE) - don't connect and ADD UP - all we doin is connivin the further destruction of our rainforests by usin-up paper and the human economy of wasting energy
So here, I add to the above, my contrib now to XTENDING THE CP DISCOURSE INTO THE SYCORAX INTO THE MAROON - this thing (my nxt blogg - also orij from Alex) on the CHIMERA OF RADIO CALL-IN PROGRAMMES - I hope we'll open a new page or chapître in this venture, calling it perhaps . . .XTENDING THE DISCOURSE. . . and hope that more people now at last will get involve - I kno they readin the blogg - as long as they don't, as so easily happens, fly off into Heidigigger & Semiotics an feget we down hey in CowPasta w/the Seminoles
p/s we also have to emerge a tidalectics of courage and is-it-worth-it. So much of what we doin is thankless and apparently sisyphean - comin from no sure base of achievement or mythology, goin into no future of distance or groundation. which is why I talk about sycoraX and Maroon, nation-language, ahimsa, culture of poverty and the alterNative, tidalectics, nam, and Namsetoura and have started - thank Xango thank Damballa thank Yemanjaa - to be able to incorp these lwa, really, into my writing and now - thanks paradoXically to the reality of the crisis of CP - into my livity. in other words, I for one can begin to say, from xperience, that what I say is what I am living and that what I livin is becoming what and how I am writing. And this is saying far far more than I ever dreamed I wd have been abel to say a year ago - as if what I am seeing through the glass darkly of the DS, may well be emerging into some kind of clarity in what I'm so unXpectedly writing even now as we speak to each other on the internet
But can this be sustained maintained passed on accumulated through others, continued into local speech and currency; will there be a marley to lyrics this into the hearts & minds of multitudes elsewhere & yet unborn, where, if it doant go there, won't go anywhere, let me tell you. We can't be content w/the courage and the moral & ethical discoveries of CP - tho we grateful for them. We have to kno that others out there listening, that there's real hope - certainly I wd say of CHANGE; that Rayside will indeed unfill the lake of thorns - an aesthetic & environmental astonishment in itself if done; that the remaining pastures & gullies of the Caribbean will remain what they have always been - gods gift to the people and the people's gift to their poets & poppets an prophets
<..>>
p/s - one lass point. In these days of digital technology, I find it hard to understand why our building/construction, so perverse and pervasive throughout our ilann/islands, has to be so VANDAL and destructive. Surely a ?little more attention to planning, aesthetics, environmental & sociocultural concern, and modern technology, wd obviate a lot of the bomblast, the abandon cutting-down of trees & vegetation, the brutal filling in of ponds, erasure of history, and the rubble-up of people's houses & their
legacies to 'make space/make waste' - the
XODUST
After all, surgery today is no longer conducted with hammer & chisel. where is the sense of laser & microscape & leonardo & ile ife in the haste w/which we are destroying our hoomforts? where is the layin
on of hands?
(3)
Caribbean Arable
KB/3 June 05
The Caribbean - its 3,000 miles of some 3,000 islands, totems of an ancient collapsed cordillera at right angles (that's why perhaps it collapsed) to the main Americas massif running from Alaska thru MeXico to Tierra del Fuego - a magnificent 7,000 miles0 is not as naturally 'arable' as one wd think from the postcard propaganda, though the 18th /19th century Euro/American sugar plantations made wonders out of whats there - or what was there - the intense sugar industry consuming the alluvial pockets & terraces for centuries. Remember also the violent geological origin of the archipelago - those volcanoes - most islands in fact the vulcan itself - harsh, thorn, basalt, iron; and those wonderful coastlines - the very helen glory of the Caribbean - not much arable in those 20,000 miles. Even so even now we don't do too badly - at least 10 of our territories are over the world av arable of 10.58% [World Factbook (2000): Bdos 37%, Cuba 24%, St Kitts/Nevis 22% , the DR 21%, Haiti 20%, Antigua/Barbuda 18%, Grenada 15%, TT 15%, Ja 14% - tho of course these % don't necessarily reflect quality of management and - increasingly - availability for our arables (sugar, banana, spices) on the world market. At least we shd be feeding ourselves - but under the praxis of the mercantilism we were victims of and now embrace(!) - our 'absolute advantage' (Adam Smith) is not to do this, but buy from the cheapest (protected) seller - and not really the cheapest after all, but the ones w/the 'absolute advantage' in the lineage we have allowed ourselves - failure of Bandung? - and forced! - to remain (obediently) a part of [for a useful retrospective on BANDUNG see Le Monde Diplomatique May 2005 http://mondediplo.com/2005/05/17bandung]
So that both Barbados & St Kitts/Nevis, despite their still comparatively high arable percentages (but China's fig in 2004 was 43%, India's in 2002/almost 55%) (the USA stands at 19%. Bahamas our prime tourist destination has only 1% arable - like the VI; tho it cd be argued that unlike Barbados' non-volcanic coral w/rich African alluvial; these 1% were always shoreline sand & salt & mangrove marsh) find themselves rapidly de-escalating these figures since agriculture is no longer profitable. but tourism is. so it's become the primary business of most of our Govts - certainly Bdos
The struggle is esp acute & poignant in Barbados because of its original status as agriculture and pasture and the psyche of the place is based upon this kind of landscape/manscape; and because historically the black people of this island, descendants of slavery, were not allowed to own land - were not even permitted to build unless the houses were of a certain dimension, made of a certain material and shd have no foundational connection w/the earth - a terrible metonym in itself. The bajan chattel house had to be portable, resting, like a hern on its eggs, on coral-stone 'groundsill' blocks
Dispassionate compassionate accounts of these histories are hard to find. to put it mildly. in fact the only 'account' we really have is in Geo Lamming's great autobiographical novel, In the castle of my skin, and that's dated 1953
Reading the more 'scientific' agricultural reports, eg Kendall & Petracco ( HYPERLINK http://www.caribank.org/Staff_Pa.nst http://www.caribank.org/Staff_Pa.nst) and the magisterial GEOBarbados/State of Environment Report 2000 pub by the UN Environment Programme for the Ministry of Physical Development & Environment, Barbados (2001) ( HYPERLINK http://www.pnuma.org/dewaluc-old/eng/barbados.pdf) www.pnuma.org/dewaluc-old/eng/barbados.pdf), one notes the steady decline not only of agriculture - the Bajan Food Import Dependency Rate rising from 60% in 1970 to a flickering 100% in 2000; but the decline of small holdings from 27,626 with a total of 12,546 acres in 1961 to 16,951 in 1989, with a total acreage of 7,880; so you can imagine what the figures are now (June 2005)
But most disturbing, and that's why I place 'scientific' in inverted commas above, is the obvious attempt to avoid calling our lack of spades what they are; instead there is a whole language of AdamSmithian 'xplanation' (the decline is due to our response to world conditions - globalization, now; and the need to satisfy an xpanding population which inc a significant percentage, one notes, of what are called 'stay-over tourists' - i.e new wealthy settlers with their lien and leaning on the land (buying lots & spots in the multi--millions); and above all, just plain avoidance of the issue, avoidance even of the statistics - so we nvr really kno where we are in the island
Tourism & Developmental Progress and NAFTA (since 1994) are restoring the plantation - consuming the land once again, this time w/the building frenzy, dispossessing people as if their houses are still on squat stilts of stone, and showing no regard for the divine nature of the already cruelly xploited but paradisiacal lannscape, and bringing back in all the slavemasters
My problem at CP - in all its aspects - has to do w/these slavemasters. of whatever hue & cry. and how, as of yore, they bulldoze away &/or 'relocate' the property or livingspace of poor people like @Emmerton, Church Village, Thyme Bottom, CowPasture, SixMens Bay but don't/can't/won't (dare) touch the property of 'others' like @SandyLane, Westmoreland, Millennium Heights where instead of public roads being driven through people & poet's property, public roads are closed or diverted, and walls are put up to make way for & ensure busha golfcourses & privacy
(4)
ChiquitaBananas
Clinton's Caribbean Trip: Chiquita aims to wipe out banana farmers
By Deidre Griswold, Workers World, 18 June 1997
Where the lush green hills meet the aqua sea, millions of people are worrying how they'll survive if a U.S. move to cut the European market for bananas takes effect. Bill Clinton's recent visit to Barbados only confirmed the seriousness of the situation. There are 16 independent nations in the Caribbean, providing a home to 32 million people. This lovely area has been intensely exploited ever since European colonizers exterminated the Native peoples and set up sugar plantations worked by slaves kidnapped from Africa.
Since decolonization, many of the smaller islands have depended largely on bananas for an income. In St.Lucia, Dominica, St.Vincent and the Grenadines, for example, one-quarter of the labor force works in the banana industry, either growing, processing or shipping the fruit.
This industry is not dominated by large plantations, as with sugar production. Rather, the bananas are raised by small growers and the national income is distributed more equally.
A special agreement with the European Union allows current or former British and French colonies in the Caribbean a guaranteed share of the European market. It also puts a limit on banana imports from Central and South America, where workers earning as little as $2 a day process the fruit on huge plantations dominated by U.S. companies like Chiquita Brands and Dole Food.
But in March the U.S. government got a preliminary judgment from the World Trade Organization that, if made formal, would cut down the European quota system on which much of the Caribbean banana industry depends.
Why has Washington been so aggressive in taking this issue to the WTO? No bananas are produced in the U.S. The ruling won't create jobs here. But it will boost the profits of Chiquita and Dole. Chiquita is the cutesy name some advertising agency thought up for United Brands, earlier known as United Fruit.
That name became especially hated after 1954, when United Fruit employed the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the progressive Arbenz government in Guatemala. Arbenz had tried to nationalize vast tracts of land that United Fruit held idle while Guatemalan peasants went hungry.
Carl Lindner and his family control a $13-billion empire that includes Chiquita, an insurance company and a financial holding company. The Lindner family gave $2.4 million in the past four years to candidates of both large capitalist parties in the U.S. Lindner is one of those contributors who's slept at the White House and had "coffee" with Clinton.
Lindner has much to gain from the government's intervention. But the Caribbean banana growers have much to lose. "What do the Americans want to do--reduce us to another Haiti?" asked Rupert Gajadhar, chair of the St.Lucia Banana Growers Association. Back in the 1980s, when the U.S. military invaded the small island of Grenada to destroy a leftist government there, Washington was making all kinds of promises to the Caribbean countries. The Caribbean Basin Initiative was going to open a new day of development and prosperity for the islands.
U.S. aid to the region in 1985 was $226 million. But it's less than a tenth of that now, leading St. Lucia's Prime Minister Vaughan Lewis to say, "We have dropped off the geopolitical map." So it's no wonder that Clinton's visit to Barbados to meet the leaders of CARICOM, the Caribbean trade group, went over like a lead balloon. So did Washington's anti-Cuba preachings.
Cuba's valiant efforts to maintain its sovereignty and dignity in the teeth of nearly 40 years of U.S. economic war strike a deep chord among the Caribbean peoples. So does the aid Cuba gave Grenada and continues to give to other Caribbean countries, despite its own difficult conditions.
This explains why the present conservative leader of Grenada recently visited Havana to discuss trade and cultural cooperation over U.S. objections. Many in the region can see now that all the U.S. promises about development aid were only meant to stifle movement toward true independence in an area where revolutionary sentiment and a respect for socialism's achievements had been growing among the masses.
URGENT ALERT -by Cuba's Granma correspondent - Cino Colina
Now that much is being said about the Americas Free Trade Area, from which Cuba is excluded as part of Washington's aggressive policy, the Latin American Economic System (SELA) has just published a report entitled "Notas Estrategicas" (Strategic Notes) which issues an urgent warning and alert concerning the acute contradiction between Pres.Clinton's interest in promoting that Institution and the legal possibilities of negotiating it, as long as US legislators remain divided on the issue.
SELA identifies four sensitive points that must be worked out in the medium term.
First is the need to clarify support for what the smallest economies require, given the huge differences among the 34 countries which make up the Free Trade Area. One can easily grasp the abyss which lies between the US economy, one of the largest in the world, and those of countries like HAITI and HONDURAS, considered to be among the poorest on the planet.
Secondly, the report points to the connection between free trade and the treatment of other political, economic and social issues which have been ignored so far. In 1994 the Miami Summit agreed to initiate solid mechanisms for the promotion of investments, development and integration of capital markets, the creation of a hemispheric structure, recognition of the burden posed by the foreign debt, and progress in cooperation related to energy, telecommunications, science, technology and tourism. These priorities for Latin Am and the Caribbean have been lacking serious efforts, SELA states, compared with those of free trade.
The Third warning concerns the contribution amount expected from each country, and, what they will get in return.
Finally, SELA wants to hear about the bilateral, subregional and multilateral commitments to the future norms on the part of the 34 nations, which implies strategic decisions taken by each of the participating States.
The document also analyses the differences existing among US legislators concerning the free trade area, which have blocked congressional approval of the fundamental trade initiatives. Also President Clinton has no authority to negotiate without the authority of Congress. Extreme care is paramount. The smaller countries may be easily deceived, as were the native peoples by Chris.Columbus' trinkets." (Cuba is needed here also! JC)
(5)
Free Trade and Fair Trade – The Bigger Picture (Why it’s not just about which bananas you buy) - Heidi Errington
<Development in Action (India) 2005/
http://www.developmentinaction.org/newspages/index/53.php>
It’s kind of easy to think of Fair Trade as being about paying more for all that stuff we like – tea, chocolate, sugar, and bananas.
Though putting our money where our mouth is can be a useful tactic (if we can afford it), there are other things to bear in mind.
Free trade as it stands is inherently unfair and demands reform. We can influence this by choosing fair trade goods as consumers, but we need to go beyond this - in terms of campaigning and lobbying, talking and protesting about the injustices of this skewed system.
Economic growth and the politics of liberalisation continue to benefit rich countries, large companies and the already wealthy.
The WTO effectively works in favour of a few rich countries in overturning the laws of elected governments in less powerful countries. What it oversees is ‘trickle up’ economics.
Whilst liberalisation forges inroads into developing economies, trade barriers are erected to block exports from developing countries. It’s a two-tier system. Subsidies (notably for agriculture in the US and EU) and large scale dumping of goods on developing world economies are also wildly unhelpful. Unfair trade in services and ‘intellectual property’ (e.g. patents) are also issues that badly need addressing.
The link between unfair global trade and the increasing gulf between rich and poor is well documented, and is acknowledged by the UN.
Big business has more access to high-level decision- making, and has become so powerful that they now hold more sway over governments than citizens do.
In the global business arena there is a race to the bottom, with standards and costs constantly pushed down to please shareholders.
Be an active citizen, voter and consumer: Hassle your MP, the secretary of state for Trade, the Prime Minister. Join an organisation like the World Development Movement or War Against Want. Ask shops to stock fair trade products. Support you local economy where possible, small shops selling local produce. Reduce what you buy – we consume far more than we need to. Remember - your lifestyle impacts on other people - uncomfortable but true.
GARMENT WORKERS AND FREE TRADE
The fourth World Social Forum, held this year in Mumbai, highlighted many of the issues affecting trade in India and other developing countries. One hundred thousand people from 132 countries essentially held an alternative meeting to the World Economic Forum.
Clothes manufacturing was one focus point. Women make up a disproportionate number of workers in this field.
They are paid poverty wages and work long hours - often under forced overtime (if you don’t do it, there will be no work for you tomorrow). Factories are often dangerous places to work. Tens of millions of workers are employed in these conditions, in over two hundred countries(including India ) . Hundreds of thousands of Indian children work in factories, many of these are textile sweatshops. This is the sort of trade that keeps people trapped in poverty.
In this industry, big name retailers subcontract work to sewing contractors and factories. When challenged on their accountability for conditions in sweatshops, the corporations shy away from taking responsibility. Where codes of conduct are in place they are frequently undermined by the pressure put on factories by big companies, placing last minute orders and demanding ever-cheaper products.
There are no binding contracts for the supplier; specific amounts of clothes are traded at fixed prices to respond to the whims of the market. This ‘flexibility’ in the supply chain means that the people at the bottom tend to be the cheapest and most expendable workforce in the world. Such buying practices also mean factories cannot maintain standards in working life as well as fulfilling orders and keeping lucrative contracts.
Textiles are one of the most lucrative industries in the world . Currently, the way that companies such as Tesco, Wal-Mart and Puma do business is leading to the exploitation of women.
Oxfam, the TUC and Labour behind the Label are campaigning for greater respect for workers in the textiles industry. ‘Play Fair at the Olympics’ is their current forum in the push for positive change.
Information for this article was gained from ‘The impact of free trade on garment workers: The sweatshop phenomenon’ By Laxmi Murthy (http://www.infochangeindia.org ) Also useful to look at is: www.india.indymedia.org
INDIA AND GATS
India has demanded that the WTO meets its demands for an assessment of GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services). GATS is an international trade agreement currently being negotiated through the WTO. It includes essential basic services like water, health, education and electricity. NGOs are worried that this could have all kinds of negative impacts on human rights.
India has already been stung by the involvement of multinationals in provision of services. According to a World Development Movement report, ENRON has a disastrous involvement in the Dabhol power plant near Mumbai. At the time, it was India ’s biggest ever foreign investor. The venture collapsed after the Maharashtra State Government withheld payment. The electricity generated was at a price way and above what the Government had expected to pay.
In South Africa , privatisation of water has meant that rich people can afford to swim in luxury pools, whilst the poor are disconnected when they can’t afford the new price hikes. Meanwhile, the big water companies make a tidy profit. French and British water companies, already involved in developing countries, are now pressing for further liberalisation.
India has been vocal in its opposition to controversial new issues in international trade, it wants more flexibility for developing countries to nurture their own industries and restrict imports. Along with other countries, its protests led to the collapse of talks at the Cancun Conference in September 2003.
GATS in India – one of the southern groups the World Development Movement has worked closely with is Equations, who are based in India . Their website is: www.equitabletourism.org
COCA-COLA IN INDIA
Plachimada in Kerala, Wada in Maharashtra and Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh.
These three places have all found the same things happening. When the Coca-Cola bottling factory moves in, they hoover up all the groundwater. Locals have experienced severe water shortages, with village wells running dry.
This situation often has the greatest impact on the lives of rural women, who are torn between needing to work in the fields to earn a living, and walking for two kilometres to find clean water for their families.
In Kerala, Coca Cola gave ‘fertiliser’ to locals to spread on their crops. This was waste products from the manufacture of Coke, and was later tested and found to contain toxic levels of heavy metals such as lead. There has been a 24-hour vigil outside the plant in Kerala since April 2002.
Information taken from the ‘Schnews’ Website – 23 January Issue
THE BASMATI BATTLE
Vananda Shiva is fighting against a phenomena she calls ‘biopiracy’. What she sees at stake is both indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.
A partial victory over the attempts by RiceTec to patent Basmati was won when, in 2001, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office disallowed much of the application for the Basmati patent. This followed a storm of protests from around the world. ‘’Life forms and traditional knowledge cannot be treated as inventions. They need to be excluded from patentability, in India and every other country’’
‘The battle over biodiversity, biopiracy and IPRs (intellectual property rights) is also at the heart of the demand of Third World countries for the reform of TRIPs (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, including patenting), rather than its implementation. Southern countries want to remove patentability of living resources from TRIPs, the recognition of traditional knowledge and biopiracy made illegal.
“Biopiracy is not restricted to Basmati; karela, jamun, tamarind, haldi, neem, ginger, anar, pepper, amla have
all been patented’’
The WTO agreement on TRIPS intervenes by imposing rules that protect patents and trademarks – mostly held by multinationals. This allows multi- nationals to own rights to the use of plants and natural derivatives, like the natural pesticide from the neem tree, which has been used for hundreds of years by farmers but has now been patented by a US corporation.’’ (World Development Movement)
“Patents of our crops are a new form of biocolonialism …Stopping biopiracy demands shaping the appropriate laws for seeds, biodiversity and patents, nationally and internationally for the defence of our biological and intellectual wealth.’’
Quotes from an article by Dr. Vandana Shiva (www.poptel.org.uk/panap/latest/basmati.htm)
OPENING UP TRADE
AFFECTS MEN AND WOMEN DIFFERENTLY
“In Ghana , women who had produced food for local markets came under pressure to give up their land for
cash crops. The man then got the income when these crops were exported. Imported rice put many women
farmers in the Philippines out of business. They had to take jobs on pineapple or banana plantations where they were exposed to pesticides and other dangerous chemicals” (World Development Movement) If you want to find out more - Members of the International Gender and Trade Network are involved inraising awareness about the implications on women of the different global trade agreements – especially GATS.
(6)
The CowPasture connXion
Cowpasture is only a small & ?unimportant plot to 'rab' land near the Grantley Adams airport, designated as part of thee development/xpansion project of the airport,. And there is no Question that airports are runways perhaps even runaways into new multinational incomes - as long as tourism flourishes and we are doing all we can in the Caribbean to ensure that this happens - despite the set backs and the uncertainty factor (the same kind of factor we knew and had to deal with in the days of slave plantation sugar); and because, let's face it, we have been left, as we enter the 21st century with nothing else - back to the familiar one-crop monopoly economy
But that don't mean that the Authorities must throw their weight around, imitating the old plantation behaviours and adopting the intimidating methods of 19th century behemoth xploitation - destroying the environment with heavy clumsy noisy polluticating machines to clear the way, at all costs and at high human & spiritual cost, for the sake of totalitarian 'progress' and I say 'totalitarian' because is based on board room and behind-closed door and behind closed minds activities and attitudes - this kind of progress has nothing in common with prograss, which the pasture represents and small & david as it is, challenges the rumbles and the ramparts
And in so doing, links - connects - with all that's been written & quoted above and links with the xtraordinary discourse even now in progress over this small moment of this small island on the internet and in the hearts and minds of the increasing many who are becoming interested in whats going on. in the stand that we making here for human & moral & artistic rights & justice
Barbados began (after the ?disappearance of the Arawaks) and has continued, as a TOTAL PLANTATION. there was no maronage as in Brazil or the Guyanas or Haiti or Jamaica or SV. the chattel houses and the pastures were and are our spiritual alternative. thru them we become alter. native & Lamming & Sobers & Broodie & Bruce St John & Ras Akyem & Ras Ishi & choral coral aladura & yr great great great grannmother Namsetoura