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Conquest of Nature
Elizabeth Dore’s article, “Open
Wounds,” in your September report [Vol. XXV, No. 21, gave an excellent
history of mining and its impact on the
environment up to the present. How-
ever, the article hardly mentioned the
present-day impact of oil development in Latin America, particularly in the
Amazon. The war we are currently
waging against indigenous people and the rain forest ecosystem for oil is no
less atrocious than the Persian Gulf War.
There are 22 oil companies among
them, British Petroleum, U.S. Shell, Arco and Unocal in the Ecuadorian
Amazon alone. Their operations are
protected by the military. More disturb-
ing, weapons, vehicles and other mate-
riel used to “control” the local residents
are often made in the United States.
Near Lago Agrio in Ecuador, contami-
nation of the watershed area from oil waste and spills has damaged more
than seven million acres. The construc-
tion of roads in previously inaccessible
areas of rain forest resulted in coloniza-
tion and deforestation that has destroyed
another 13 million acres.
Susan Meeker-Lowry
Catalyst
Montpellier, Vermont
With the end of the Cold War, envi-
ronmentalism may be the new para-
digm that will replace “economism” in
both national and international political
arenas. It seems inevitable that political
activists will try to make alliances with
environmentalists as the connections
between systematic impoverishment and environmental degradation become
more stark and overwhelming. In Latin
America, even elite politicians are mak-
ing this point. The president of Brazil, a
neo-liberal trapped by the system he is
trying to reform, recently declared that
the upcoming U.N. Conference on En-
vironment and Development to be held
in Rio de Janeiro in June will only be
successful if it goes beyond “discus-
sions of environmental problems” to “a
profound reflection on the international
model of development.”
There is no doubt that environmen-
talism can be a powerful tool of analy-
sis. In “The Conquest of Nature,” the
scholars have provided a framework
for action; now we have to figure out
what to do, locally and globally.
Linda Rabben
Rainforest Foundation
Washington, D.C.
As Daniel Faber points out in “A
Sea of Poison,” the abuse of pesticides in cotton cultivation in the Pacific
coastal plains of Central America has
exacted a heavy ecological and human
toll. In Nicaragua, surveys conducted
by the Ministry of Health in 1988 and
1989 show that 12% of small farmers in
the country’s principal agricultural re- gion (the departments of Leon and
Chinandega) reported being poisoned at work during the previous year. An
estimated 5,000 workers of the region’s
650,000 people required medical treat- ment. The risk of poisoning is highest
among young workers, and children
under 16 years of age accounted for 15
to 20% of poisonings during the latter
half of the 1980s.
New evidence indicates chronic in-
jury to the brain results from poisoning
with organophosphate insecticides
(chemical cousins to nerve gases used
in chemical weapons), which cause most
poisonings in Latin America. In addi-
tion, many pesticides which do not re-
sult in immediate poisoning may cause
a wide variety of chronic diseases. The
pesticide chlorodimeform, used widely in cotton cultivation throughout Latin
America in the 1970s and 1980s, is
metabolized in the body to a chemical
which causes the risk of bladder cancer
in workers to increase by 73-fold. The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has proposed severely restricting use in the United States of maneb and man-
cozeb, two fungicides used in vegetable
cultivation throughout Latin America,
because food residues pose an unaccep-
table risk of cancer to consumers. These
fungicides, applied by workers with
leaky backpack sprayers and no protec- tive equipment, may cause birth defects
and perhaps chronic damage to the ner-
vous system, in addition to cancer.
Although the prospect for signifi-
cant improvement in pesticide policy in
the short term is bleak in Nicaragua and
throughout Central America, several
international initiatives to reduce the
use of the most hazardous pesticides
deserve our support: 1) The Pesticide
Action Network has organized a cam-
paign to ban international trade in 12 of
the most toxic pesticides; 2) Senator
Patrick Leahy has introduced the”Circle
of Poison” legislation, which would
prohibit the export (and subsequent
reimportation as residues on imported
food) of pesticides which cannot be
used in the United States; 3) A tort suit
brought in Texas by Costa Rican ba-
nana workers sterilized by the nemato-
cide DBCP may encourage Shell, Dow
and others to quit marketing pesticides
banned in the United States, because
they are known to harm workers; 4)
CARE requires that alternatives to haz-
ardous pesticides be used in its interna-
tional agricultural development projects
in Nicaragua and elsewhere. The World
Bank and other development agencies
which have helped promote chemical-
intensive agriculture should be required
to follow CARE’s initiative.
Feliciano Pacheco Antdn, M.D.
Office of Occupational Health
Le6n and Chinandega, Nicaragua
Rob McConnell, M.D.
Mt. Sinai Medical Center, N.Y.
Matthew Keifer, M.D.
University of Washington, Seattle
Free Trade
Bruce Campbell’s “Beggar Thy
Neighbor” in your May report [Vol.
XXIV, No. 6] is a particularly good
example of the low level of political
discussion on free trade that we endure
these days. Mr. Campbell blames his
bete-noire for everything from the Ca-
nadian recession (which has happened
in the United States too, let us not
forget, and in other parts of the world as
well) to governmental efforts to trim
the deficit on the backs of the poor.
As evidence of how unpopular the
Free Trade Agreement is among Cana-
dians, Campbell points to Prime Minis-
ter Brian Mulroney’s unpopularity. But
there are certainly many other reasons
for this unpopularity, foremost among
them the federal goods and services tax
(GST), and particularly the iron-fisted
way that it was rammed through Parlia-
ment. And then there is the govern-
ment’s ham-fisted attack on the deficit
at the very time (in the midst of a
recession) that this should not be on the
agenda. And what about the Meech
Lake Accord, high interest rates and the
recession itself? It seems dishonest to
imply that all those people who are
against Mulroney are against him be-
cause of the FTA. Indeed, I think it was
precisely the FTA that got the Conser-
vatives elected to their second term,
however erroneous the expectation
among ordinary Canadians that this
agreement would allow them togo shop-
ping in the United States without prob-
lems at the border on their return.
Campbell says he is opposed to the
Bank of Canada’s high interest-rate
policy. In this, he is at one with the
business community. But just because
he doesn’t like this policy doesn’t mean
that it is extraordinary or inexplicable,
or that “a backroom deal with the United
States may be responsible.” The Gov-
ernor of the Bank of Canada is ap-
pointed by, but not answerable to, the
government of the day. The current
governor, John Crowe, is keen on keep-
ing inflation down. His main instru-
ment is interest rates, which he keeps
up. High interest rates bring foreign
money into the country from places
with lower interest rates and conse-
quently keep the dollar higher than it
would otherwise be. And that keeps the
price of imports down. But since the
U.S. dollar is inherently more popular
than the Canadian dollar, interest rates
are normally higher here than there
anyway. The author is against high in-
terest rates and the high dollar because
he thinks that a lower dollar would
increase exports. But he also complains
vehemently against foreign takeovers
of Canadian companies. A lower dollar
would presumably increase those as
well.
Campbell complains about the 15%
softwood lumber export tax, which our
government imposed under U.S. pres-
sure a few years ago. In my view, this is
one case where the United States raised
our environmental standards for us. The
issue arose because provincial govern-
ments, especially the one in British
Columbia, charged the lumber compa-
nies nothing, or next to nothing, for
cutting down trees, feeling apparently
CON TINUED ON PAGE 14
VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 4 (FEBRUARY 1992)
that the forests are an unlimited re-
source which should be provided free
to any company that wishes to knock
them down. The United States, which
charges lumber companies hefty
“stumpage fees,” saw the provincial
government policy as an unfair sub-
sidy, and threatened to impose a
countervailing duty. But the Canadian
government persuaded the United States
to let it collect the tax, in the form of an
export duty, instead. Campbell com-
plains that the FTA leads to lowering of
environmental standards. And he quotes
lumber industry sources (hardly,I would
think, reliable ones under the circum-
stances) alleging that this tax (“as well
as the rise in the Canadian dollar”) is the
cause of what they claim is a high
number of job losses in the industry.
Well, job losses in the lumber industry
means to me that we are chopping down
our forests more slowly, not necessar-
ily a bad thing.
lan Dale
Ottawa, Ontario
Bruce Campbell replies:
The current Canadian economic cri-
sis cannot be dismissed as simply the
result of international recession. The
collapse of employment is most dra-
matic in manufacturing. Since the be-
ginning of the free trade era, 461,000
jobs, 23% of the manufacturing work
force, have disappeared, according to
Statistics Canada. By comparison,
manufacturing employment in the
United States has dropped a mere 6.3%.
Secondly, manufacturing lost 150,000
jobs in 1989 alone, long before the
formal onset of the recession. Thirdly,
during the 1981-1982 recession, 22%
of jobs lost were due to permanent
closures. In three years of free trade,
65% of job losses were the result of
permanent closures.
These facts indicate a restructur-
ing driven by free trade, superimposed
on a cyclical downturn. Nor should
this come as a surprise. A largely for-
gotten 1985 Conservative government
document anticipated a dislocation of
up to 900,000jobs. Ontario and Quebec
governments both predicted potential
losses of 280,000 and 350,000 jobs
respectively. What is surprising is the
speed at which the restructuring is tak-
ing place.
Dale attributes the government’s
unpopularity to the GST, not free trade,
but is unaware that this tax was clearly
linked to the trade deal. A Prudential-
Bache Securities document noted the
importance of bringing in the GST in a
free-trade environment dominated by
transnationals. If the previous tax, the
manufacturer’s sales tax (MST) on Ca-
nadian-made inputs, had been left in-
tact under free trade, transnationals,
most of whose trade is intra-firm, could
simply have evaded the tax. This would
have raised the price of Canadian-made
inputs relative to inputs imported from
the United States, and consequently the
cost of production would have risen.
Before free trade, the Canadian govern-
ment could offset these ill effects with
tariffs and content requirements. Be-
cause of free trade, the Canadian gov-
ernment brought in the GST, which has
consumers paying $4 billion in taxes
formerly paid by corporations.
With respect to Dales’s bizarre con-
tention on softwood lumber, that bla-
tant U.S. infringement of Canadian sov-
ereignty was somehow good for Canada
and good for the environment, let me
quote the Canadian Environmental Law
Association: “The provision in…the
softwood lumber memorandum for ‘re-
placement measures’ leads, in British
Columbia and Quebec, to U.S. control
over provincial forest management
plans and the weakening of reforesta-
tion efforts. The softwood lumber case
underscores the potentially adverse ef-
fects on environmental regulation of
adjustment pressures stemming from
U.S. trade legislation.”
Finally, regardless of whether one
accepts the strong circumstantial evi-
dence that indicates a backroom deal to
keep the dollar high, this policy is sup-
ported, contrary to Dale’s contention,
by Canada’s premier business lobby,
and is reinforcing free trade pressures.
At one point, the Canadian bank inter-
est rate was an astonishing seven points
higher than the Federal Reserve rate.
The high dollar and the FTA both
force fundamental economic and so-
cial restructuring by exposing the Ca-
nadianeconomy (i.e. firms, workers, com-
munities, taxes, government environmen-
tal and social standards, etc.) to competi-
tive pressure from the United States.
So the FTA and the high dollar–
mutually reinforcing policy instruments
in the Conservative government’s ar-
senal-have the same goal: the restruc-
turing and harmonization of the Cana-
dian economy and society in the image
of their neoconservative brethren in the
United States. It is an agenda which
Dale, despite his pretense of value neu-
trality, apparently supports.
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