Corporations Are Not Humans---Not Even Close : Episode 2

              From Home On The Range To The Full World

   Throughout most of human history, the aggregate demand placed on the planetary ecosystem by human economic activities has been inconsequential compared with the enormous regenerative capacity of those systems, and we have not been forced to take the issue of resource limits seriously. When industrialization caused countries to exceed that national resource limits, they simply reached out to obtain what was needed from beyond their own borders, generally by colonizing the resources of nonindustrial people. Although the consequences were sometimes devastating for the colonized people, the added impact on the planetary ecosystem was scarcely noticed by the colonizers. 

  Thus, Europe's industrialization was built on the backs of its colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For the United States, this same need was met largely by colonizing its western frontiers at the expense of the Native Americans who inhabited them and y expanding its economic domain to embrace Latin America and the Philippines. Japan, a more recent colonizer, used a sophisticated combination of aid, foreign investment, and trade to colonize the resources of its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia. Asia's newly industrializing countries, South Korea and Taiwan, are now reaching out in a similar manner, as are Thailand and Malaysia. 
   When only a small portion of the world was industrialized, environmental frontiers were available for exploitation through settlement, trade, and traditional colonization. Similarly, frontier territories served as a social safety valve to absorb surplus population from industrial societies. Between 1850 and1914, difficult economic conditions in Britain (average population of 32 million) prompted an outward migration of more than 9 million people mainly to the United States.
   The era of colonizing open frontiers is now in its final stage. The most readily available frontiers have been exploited, and the competition for the few that remain in such remote locations as Iran Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, and the Brazilian Amazon is intensifying. 
  It is relevant to our current inquiry to note that the out-migration from Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that the commonly-held idea --- that colonialism benefited the people of the colonized countries --- is largely myth.  The situation was more ambiguous and has much in common with the new corporate colonialism of economic globalization. For the most part, its benefits went to the monied classes, NOT to the average citizen. A recent study of the British colonial experience by two American historians found that although wealthy investors profited from investments in the colonies, the middle class received only the tax bills that supported the vast military establishment required to maintain the empire. The study concluded , "Imperialism can best be viewed as a mechanism for transferring income from the middle to the upper classes." Economic globalization is a modern form of the same imperial phenomenon, and it carries the same consequence. 
   The bottom line for our species is that because of population growth and the more than fivefold economic expansion since 1950, the environmental demands of our economic system now fill the available environmental space of the planet. This has brought us to a historic transition point in the evolutionary development of our species from living in a world in a world that's at home on the range to living in a full world in a mere historical instant. We now have the option of adjusting ourselves to this new reality or destroying our ecological niche and suffering the consequences. 
   The first environmental limits that we have confronted, and possibly exceeded, are not the limits of renewable resources and the  environment's ability to absorb our wastes ---referred to by ecologists as "sink functions." Evidence of our encounter with these limits is everywhere. Acid rain has damaged 31 million hectares of forest in Europe alone. At the global level, each year deserts encroach on another 6 million hectares of once productive land. The area covered by tropical forest is reduced by 11 million hectares, there is net loss of 26 billion tons of soil from oxidation and erosion, and 1.5 million hectares of prime agricultural land are abandoned due to salinization from irrigation projects. Per capita grain production has been falling since 1984. Five percent of the ozone layer over North America, and probably globally, was lost between 1980 and 1990. There has been a 2 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  in the past 100 years. 
   The countries that are consuming beyond their environmental means control the rule-making process of the international community. They adjust the rules to ensure their own ability to make up their national environmental deficits through imports ---often without being mindful of the implications for the exporting countries. 

     El Salvador and Costa Rica grow export crops such as bananas coffee, and sugar on more than one fifth of their cropland. Export cattle ranches in Latin America and southern Africa have replaced rain forest and wildlife range. At the consumer end of the production line, Japan imports 70 percent of its corn, wheat, and barley, 95 percent of its soybeans, and more than 50 percent of its wood, much of it from the rapidly vanishing rain forests of Borneo. In the Netherlands millions of pigs and cows are fattened on palm-kernel cake from deforested lands in Malaysia, cassava from deforested regions Thailand, and soybeans from pesticide-dosed expanses in the south of Brazil in order to provide European consumers with their high-fat diet of meat and milk. 

   The lands used by Southern countries to produce food for export are unavailable to the poor of those countries to grow the staples they require to meet their own basic needs.  The people who are displaced to make way for export-oriented agriculture add to urban overcrowding or move to more fragile and less productive lands that quickly become overstressed. The grains that many Southern countries import from the North in exchange for their own food exports are often used primarily as feedstocks to produce meat for upper-income urban consumers. The poor are the double losers. 

   These dynamics are invisible to Northern consumers, who, if they do raise questions, are assured that this  arrangement provides needed jobs and income for the poor of the south, allowing them to meet their food needs more cheaply than if they grew the basic grains themselves. It seems like a plausible theory, but in practice the only certain beneficiaries of this shift from food economy to trade dependence have been the transnational agribusiness corporations that control commodities trade.