Corporations Are Not Humans---Not Even Close : Episode 3

         Harmful Effects of Economic Globalization ---cont

   Economic globalization has greatly expanded opportunities for the rich to pass their environmental burdens to the poor by exporting both wastes and polluting factories. This has been a particularly common practice among Japanese companies, with nearby Southeast Asia being a major recipient. The figures are striking. Japan has reduced its domestic aluminum smelting capacity from 1.2 million tons to 140,000 tons and now imports 90 percent of its aluminum. 
   What this involves in human terms is suggested by a case study of the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corporation (PASAR). PASAR operates a Japanese-financed and constructed copper smelting plant in the Philippine province of Leyte to produce high-grade copper cathodes for shipment to Japan. The plant occupies 400 acres of land expropriated by the Philippine government from local residents at giveaway prices. Gas and wastewater emissions from the plant contain high concentrations of boron, arsenic, heavy metal, and sulfur compounds that have contaminated local water supplies, reduced fishing and rice yields, damaged the forests, and increased the occurrence of upper-respiratory diseases among local residents. Local people whose homes, livelihoods, and health have been sacrificed to PASAR now largely depend on the occasional part-time or contractual employment they are offered to do the plant's most dangerous and dirtiest jobs. 
  The company has prospered. The local economy has grown. The Japanese people have a supply of copper at no environmental cost to themselves. The local poor---the project's professed beneficiaries --- have lost their means of livelihood and suffer impaired health. The Philippine government is repaying the foreign aid loan from Japan that financed the construction of supporting infrastructure for the plant. And Japanese are congratulating themselves for the cleanliness of their domestic environment and their generous assistance to the poor of the Philippines. 
   There is nothing particularly special about this case, other than the fact that it has been documented. Thousands of similar stories illustrate the realities of corporate globalization. The Economist, an ardent globalization proponent, has argued that those who criticize such toxic dumping practices would deprive the poor of needed economic opportunities. 
   Although an open trading system is sometimes advocated as necessary to make up for the environmental deficits of those who have too little, it more often works in exactly the exactly the opposite way --- increasing the environmental deficits of those who have too little to provide additional environmental resources for those who already have more than their need. Furthermore, an open trading system makes it easier for the rich to keep the consequences of this transfer out of their own sight. The further out of sight those consequences are, the easier it is for those who hold power to ignore or rationalize them. 

             GROWTH IN THE NAME OF DEVELOPMENT

   Many developmental economists believe that moving a country on the path to industrialization requires that labor be forced off the farm and into the cities so that agriculture can be modernized and an urban industrial labor pool can be created. The parallels to the enclosure process in Britain are striking. Costa Rica provides a particularly egregious contemporary example of how it works. 
   Before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank restructured Costa Rica's economic policies in the name of easing its foreign debt problems. Costa Rica was widely known as one of the most stable, peaceful, prosperous, and equitable of Southern countries. It had a strong base of small farmers and a few of the large landholdings characteristic of other Latin American societies. The policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank shifted the economic incentives away from small farms producing foods that Costa Ricans eat toward large estates producing for export. As a consequence, thousands of small farmers have been displaced, their lands have been consolidated into large ranches and agricultural estates producing for export, and Costa Rica's income gap is becoming more like that of the other Latin American countries. An increase in crime and violence has required sharp increases in public expenditures on police and public security. The country now depends on imports to meet basic food requirements, and the foreign debt that the structural adjustment was supposed to reduce has doubled. As outrageous as the consequences of their policies have been, the IMF and the World Bank point to Costa Rica as a structural adjustment success story because economic growth has increased and the country is now able to meet its growing debt service payments. 
   In Brazil, the conversion of agriculture from smallholders producing food for domestic consumption to capital-intensive production for export displaced 28.4 million people between 1960 and 1980 ---a number greater than the entire population of Argentina. In India, large-scale development projects have displaced 20 million people over a forty-year period. In 1989, ongoing World Bank projects were displacing 1.5 million people, and projects in preparation threatened another 1.5 million. Bank staffers were unable to point to a single bank-funded project in which the displaced people had been relocated and rehabilitated to a standard of living comparable to what they enjoyed before displacement. A conference on Asian development sponsored by Asian nongovernmental organizations working at the grassroots on environmental and poverty issues revealed an aspect of Asia's development experience that the gushing reports in World Bank documents and business periodicals never mention : 

   In Thailand, ten million rural people face eviction from the land they live on to make way for commercial tree farms. Ground water is depleted and mangroves are continually destroyed by export-oriented shrimp farms. Tribal people struggle for recognition of ancestral land rights in the forests of Eastern Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Philippines, the government's land reform program is systematically eroded by the conversion of prime agricultural lands into industrial estates and other non-agricultural uses---even as the country needs to spend its scarce foreign exchange on rice imports. Agricultural chemicals and toxic industrial wastes, including those brought to the region by foreign corporations and agencies under the guise of international assistance, continue to poison us. Dams and geothermal projects displace people and destroy agricultural and forest lands to meet the energy demands of export-oriented industries. Slum dwellers are evicted to make way for industries and shopping centers that benefit others. Destructive fishing practices, commonly sponsored by corporate interests serving foreign markets, deprive our fisherfolk of their livelihoods and threaten the regenerative capacities of our oceans. 

   We must free ourselves of the obsession of growth.