Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Economic development for the poorer countries can only take place through a
combination of trade and aid together with a degree of protection. Free trade rules
benefit strong mature economies and not weak developing ones, which require a
degree of government intervention to maintain social standards, business and economic
security. For Monbiot, contemporary free trade rules are similar in effect and purpose
to the imperial relationships and treaties first imposed on weaker nations - Brazil,
Persia, China, Japan and the Ottoman Empire - in the nineteenth century. Poor
nations are forced to grow cash crops and export raw materials to the affluent devel-
oped nations, which then 'add value' through production processes and refinement,
while externalizing any environmental costs to the country of origin. 'Footloose
capital' would be fettered. Multinationals would not be allowed to move from country
to country seeking lower labour and environmental standards in order to boost or
maintain profitability. Instead, corporations would be obliged, through incentives,
to set high standards and would be punished if they did not. Producers and consumers
should carry their own costs and not dump them on other people. Monbiot (2003)
writes:
The FTO would, in this respect, function as a licensing body: a company would
not be permitted to trade between nations unless it could demonstrate that, at
every stage of production, manufacture and distribution, its own operations and
those of its suppliers and sub-contractors met the necessary standards. If, for
example, a food-processing company based in Switzerland wished to import
cocoa from the Ivory Coast it would need to demonstrate that the plantations
it bought from were not employing slaves, using banned pesticides, expanding
into protected forests or failing to conform to whatever other standards the FTO
set. The firm's performance would be assessed, at its own expense, by a monitoring
company accredited to the organisation. There would be, in other words, no
difference between this operation and the activities of the voluntary fair-trade
movement today.
The global meets the local at Clayoquot Sound, Canada
Despite the slogans, banners and protests it is sometimes difficult to see how the
global meets the local, how abstract forces of supply and demand, of conflicts between
the old and the new, and the cultural and economic, have broader effects. The fierce
struggles, conflicts, debates and dialogues surrounding the logging of the old growth
forests on Vancouver Island in western Canada from the mid 1980s onwards show
how sustainable development frequently engages the local and global simultaneously,
how ultimately the process is unavoidably political and unavoidably personal. At
Clayoquot the interests of local businesses, the provincial government, native peoples
and environmental activists combined with regional and global economic forces,
with the needs and wants of individual and corporate consumers and the growing
global concerns with wilderness preservation, environmental protection and the
maintenance of community. The issues were (and are) far from simple and through
political action, global media debate and engaged dialogue the concept of sustainable
development was refined, applied and revised. Consequently, Clayoquot Sound is
more than the active protests and the 800 or so arrests of 1993, the clear-cut logging
practices of big corporations and the degrading of one of the most beautiful natural
