Here is an invitation to read about one of the biggest silent [or silenced] revolutions of the 21st century: the greater common good or inclusive social progress. It is necessarily a World [non]Event as one of the most ignored topics of the MSM even where ethical reporters do their utmost to keep it in the news. I begin with an excerpt of an essay from a book of the same name by Arundhati Roy. I shall introduce each World non-Event in bold, so as to highlight them Topic: Big Dams, Developmental Aid and the Third World: Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them - the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they're being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They're uncool. They're undemocratic. They're a Government's way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They're a guaranteed way of taking a farmer's wisdom away from him. They're a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they're in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes. Big Dams haven't really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man's ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It's common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do - the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open. For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it's exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides. On the one hand, the Indian Government, every Indian Government, rails self-righteously against the First World, and on the other, actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like Colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem). Over the last fifty years India has spent Rs.80,000 crores on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were. ...According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it's all we have, let's try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let's halve the number of people. Or, let's err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It's an improbably low figure, I know, but ...never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 = 33 million. That's what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren't say so, because it isn't official. It isn't official because we daren't say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can't be, I've been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can't be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a 'sixties hippie dropping acid ("It's the System, man!"), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be? Thoughts, comments, opinions? This is just one of those "common good" themes that are a World Non-Event. I will add more as discussion progresses. Source: The Greater Common Good by Arundhati Roy, 1999 The essay was published in Outlook India on May 24, 1999 and can be read in its entirety here: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?207509
Dams are probably optimal sources of power as far as maximizing production and minimizing pollution. If you build them properly, maintenance is cheap for many decades thereafter. You can use them to irrigate areas in an organized and efficient manner so that it's not too much and not too little, and you can create new ecosystems in areas where fish will be able to thrive. They're a gold mine for us Canadians in places like Quebec, they can just sit back doing nothing and make billions of dollars every year sending electricity along wires to the US. Of course established ecosystems and settlements will be affected, but in the long run many more will benefit than suffer, and thus even those who've been displaced will receive superior compensation for their losses. All this assumes you have a reasonably competent, accountable and responsible government managing these projects, otherwise they'll just mess it up big time.
How about some corresponding estimates of how many people would have been negatively impacted by alternative power sources (or the lack of said power entirely)? India, for example, has 33.6 GW of installed hydro generation capacity; what would be the impact of getting that from coal, or nuclear, or not having had it at all?
Good question. Are we assuming that big dams supply a significant amount of power to the people as compared to the costs incurred? The best estimate I could find is of the Narmada projects where over 50,000 acres of prime forest land will be submerged to supply 1.5% of the energy in India. Is that an equitable exchange, in your opinion? Keep in mind that roughly 70% of Indians have no access to regular electric supply [according to World Bank estimates, some 2 billion people i.e. a third of the world has no access to electricity, so Indians are worse off than average]. Moreover, 70% of India's energy needs are met by coal and 25% by hydroelectric power [for just the 30% that use it], leaving dismal single figure digits for developments in nuclear and wind power plants. And thats not counting the national costs of big dams on wiping out endangered habitats and species, causing flooding and earthquakes [due to weight of the water in reservoirs], releasing greenhouse gases, destroying marine fisheries and as a cause of coastal erosion. All of which may well nigh be irreversible and a much greater cost on future generations And we're not even addressing the somewhat rare incidents of collapse [an important factor in a corruption ridden economy where payoffs can undermine quality control] e.g. the 1975 disaster in China where two dams collapsed, killing 230,000 people. The overemphasis of the importance of big dams to the green revolution and agricultural production is somewhat more justified but ignores salient facts that will soon become relevant in India as many big dams reach the end of their productive lives: massive siltation. Ironically this problem is not a new one, nor has it just been recognised Even the much lauded irrigation benefits of the big dams look very different when viewed objectively against the damage caused: Further readings: 1. Big dams, big trouble: Patrick McCully link 2. Big dams are harmful; Devinder Sharma link 3. Big Dams: Bringing Poverty, Not Power to Africa. link 4. When big dams spell disaster: assessing the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. link 5. Indirect Economic Impacts of Dams: Case Studies from India, Egypt and Brazil, Editors: Ramesh Bhatia, Rita Cestti, Monica Scatasta, RPS Malik, The World Bank and Academic Foundation, 2008. link 6. Japanese government freezes construction of dam link 7. Dams and development: a new framework for decision-making; World Commission on Dams link 8. Dams and Development: Relevant Practices for Improved Decision-Making UNEP link
The assumption of a reasonable, competent, accountable, and responsible government is quite limiting. Such governments are sparse, in the world of multinationals selling dams to vulnerable countries. And the degree of competence required to handle a big dam project should be appreciated: many bad dams have been built even in first world industrialized democracies, whose governments were unable to handle or evaluate the situation thrown at them. In countries unequipped, sociologically or intellectually or economically, to handle a big dam proposal, the common best result is something like the Aswan Dam in Egypt.
Hmm seems like this topic has run its course. Topic: Speculation, Goods and Services and Labour This is a rather broad topic, so I have selected excerpts from Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World as point for takeoff. Fell free to add other examples of market economics and their effects on the unsuspecting; I apologise for the dated figures, anyone with better sources would be appreciated for more current figures on speculative capitalism and labour exploitation. In 1997, of every $100 in currency transactions, only $2.50 had anything to do with the exchange of goods and services. That same year, on the eve of the hurricane that battered stock markets in Asia and the world, the Malaysian government suggested a commonsense measure: outlawing currency trading for noncommercial purposes. The shouting of floor traders makes a lot of noise, and understandably those who benefit from currency speculation were deaf to the idea. In 1995, only three of the ten largest fortunes in Japan were linked to the real economy. The other seven multimillionaires were speculators. Ten years ago, the financial markets suffered another collapse. Distinguished U.S. economists from the White House, the Congress, and the New York and Chicago stock exchanges tried to explain what had happened. The word "speculation" was not uttered in any of their analyses. After all, popular sports deserve respect: five out of every ten North Americans play the stock market in one way or another. Just as "smart bombs" killed Iraqis in the Gulf war without anyone except the dead finding out, "smart money" earns 40 percent profits without anyone finding out how. Wall Street, which some say was named for a wall built to keep black slaves from escaping, is today the center of the great global electronic gambling den, and all of humanity is enslaved by the decisions made there. The virtual economy moves capital, trashes prices, plucks fools, ruins countries, and churns out millionaires and mendicants in the time it takes to say, "Amen." The world may be obsessed with personal insecurity, but reality teaches us that the crimes of finance capital are far more fearsome than those we read about in the papers. Mark Mobius, who speculates on behalf of thousands of investors, told the German magazine Der Spiegel at the beginning of 1998, "My clients laugh at ethical criteria. They only want us to increase their profits." During the crisis of 1987, another phrase made him famous: "You've got to buy when blood runs in the streets, even if the blood is mine." George Soros, the most successful speculator in the world, who made a fortune successively bidding down the pound, the lira, and the ruble, knows what he's talking about when he says, "The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the Communist but the capitalist threat." Capitalism's Dr. Frankenstein has created a monster that walks on its own, and nobody can stop it. It is a superstate over and above all others, an invisible power that governs us all even though it was elected by no one. In this world there is too much misery but there is also too much money, and wealth doesn't know what to do with itself. In other times, finance capital broadened the consumer market by extending credit. It served the real economy, which to exist needed to grow. Today, utterly bloated, finance capital has put the productive system to work for it, while it plays with the real economy like a cat with a mouse. Every crash on the stock exchange is a catastrophe for small investors who swallowed the line and bet their savings on the financial lottery. And it's a catastrophe for the poorest barrios of the global village, whose residents suffer the consequences without ever knowing what caused them: in a single blow each "market correction" empties their plates and wipes out their jobs. But rarely do crises on the stock exchange fatally wound the suffering millionaires who, day after day, backs bent over their computers, fingertips calloused from the keyboards, redistribute the world's wealth by moving money, setting interest rates, and deciding the value of labor, commodities, and currencies. In the British Isles, one out of every four jobs is part-time. And many are so part-time that it's hard to say why they're called jobs. To massage the numbers, as the English say, the authorities changed the statistical criteria for unemployment thirty-two times between 1979 and 1997 until they hit on the perfect formula: anyone who worked more than one hour a week was not unemployed. Not to boast, but that's how we've measured unemployment in Uruguay for as long as I can remember. Argentine businessman Enrique Pescarmona "Asians work twenty hours a day," he declared, "for eighty dollars a month. If I want to compete, I have to turn to them. It's a globalized world. The Filipino girls in our offices in Hong Kong are always willing. There are no Saturdays or Sundays. If they have to work several days straight without sleeping, they do it, and they don't get overtime and don't ask for a thing." The price of a Disney T-shirt bearing a picture of Pocahontas is equivalent to a week's wages for the worker in Haiti who sewed it at a rate of 375 T-shirts an hour. McDonald's gives its young customers toys made in Vietnamese sweatshops by women who earn eighty cents for a ten-hour shift with no breaks. Vietnam defeated a U.S. military invasion. A quarter of a century after that feat, which cost many lives, the country suffers globalized humiliation. In 1995, the Gap sold shirts "made in El Salvador." For every twenty-dollar shirt the Salvadoran workers got eighteen cents. Excerpts taken from here
Re: Topic: Big Dams, Developmental Aid and the Third World: Sorry, S.A.M., some real life things caught me. First of all, S.A.M., kudos to you for bringing up this kind of issues, especially those are big scale problems yet usually goes unnoticed (doesn't make up headlines). I have not much to say about dam building, but as far as I know, this type of bilateral or multilateral projects must always pass certain risk assessments steps, like Pressure and Impact analysis, Environmental Impact Assessment, and/or many types of other risks assessment. Those should be done properly in planning & evaluation stage. In Pressure & Impact analysis, for example, socio-economic impact analysis which includes ALL components that are going to be affected should be done. Tones and tones of report should be made in detail. But even if things are planned well, there is always something that can go wrong. Especially if it involves many parties in several countries. I know some small-scale water projects in ***** and ****** that are handled by ****** institutions; sometimes, in these projects, the impact assessment were done by the ****** people who have never been in the said countries. They do assessment through report review, surveys & interviews result review, etc, but they don't really involved in the field work, because such field work can take up months and even years, while budgets are limited. Then don't understand the local culture; they know the theoretical institutional framework but don't know the practical one that really takes place in field; and many other technical factors. Then again, sometimes such project, in which the proposal are written in ideal and heroic objectives (to help "the farmers", "the poors", and such in developing countries), are nothing but bullshit (sorry). There are people (though there might be exceptions) who actually don't give a shit about the said poors, what they need is the project itself, to keep their institution running. Then in the end of the project, they make nice report with selected documentation, and submit them to their own government, so that they can get again new projects. The situation which is not so different with the native partners in the project area itself, especially in many developing countries corruption is done in all levels. Everyone trying to take the most benefit from the project, little do they care of those that got negative impact of the projects. Unfortunately as far as my limited observation goes, very few people actually care about the ones that need the help the most. That is the disgusting part of humanity; in the end people are only care about themselves, because the resource is limited and the competition is high.
Sigh, I typed the above text in notepad, coz last time I typed, when I posted everything was gone. Gonna edit it back soon. Edit: I hope now it looks ok!
Hi kira thanks for your input. For casual readers, it may be a good idea to give the topic you are commenting on. I hope to add more topics as I come across them, about the impact of things that affect us all and never make it to the media in the same measure as they should. Heading the post with a topic would aid in comprehension for those who do not read the whole thread but feel compelled to comment.
I have added a title to the previous post. I wanted to write some more, because what I have posted just covers very few facets of typical projects. Maybe later, not sure if I can add something meaningful though!
If you're a windows/linux user, and well..get firefox, or any other mozilla-based browser, and get yourself the browser extension named: Lazarus If something should go wrong during the posting process, e.g. internet disconnection, then click on the lazarus symbol: Search Lazarus -- and it will show you your most recent post you've attempted to post, or typed out. :m:
In my opinion each big dam is unique. Some are smart policy and some are stupid policy. Some should have been built, but should have been built better and should have considered how to preserve a resource like Salmon. I like water and electricity. I would hate to give up my water and electricity. I could never ask hundreds of millions of Indians to cease aspiring to have the quality and quality of water and electricity that I enjoy. Bangladesh could benefit from being able to turn down the river flow into Bangladesh at certain times. Bangladesh will need big dike projects. The problem with big projects is that their primary political purpose is to make the contractors wealthier which makes making sure the project is built intelligently and is not a waste of tax money a lower priority.
" Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like Colonialism was." Never been so true, only I see aid as an extension of colonialism because it creates cultures of dependency like I see here in Cambodia. As for dams, water etc I suggest Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva Galeano's work needs updating since Vietnam and Cambodia have both made significant changes to their labour laws and although its not perfect its definitely an improvement. "After much debate, Vietnam’s National Assembly approved amendments to the country’s Labor Code on April 1, 2002. The Assembly made changes and revisions to 56 articles of the Labor Code, updating and amending existing law and clarifying points, which had been unclear in the previous regulations. In a major shift, foreign enterprises will be allowed to directly recruit and hire staff without going through employment agencies and middlemen. The new code also clarifies regulations on wage and salary scales, which had been the subject of some dispute under existing Circular 11. Private and foreign-invested enterprises are not required to follow State Enterprise wage scale systems under the new Code. However they are required to establish and make public a salary scale system, which must be registered with the Labor Department. Other significant amendments include the following: · Article 17. Severance allowance will now be extended to employees who have worked at the company for less than 12 months. Maximum severance will also be capped at 10 months salary. · Article 27. Temporary labor contracts will become permanent upon expiration if no new contract is signed. Also a given employee can be signed on a maximum of two temporary contracts before being signed to a permanent contract. · Article 41. An employer who illegally terminates an employee under labor contract shall be required to pay compensation of at least two months salary, in addition to accepting the worker back with pay for time lost. · Article 69. Annual overtime limit of 200 hours remains in force. However total overtime may be allowed to reach 300 hours in certain “special cases.” (These remain to be defined, but are understood to apply to the garment and footwear industries.) · Article 85. Employers shall be allowed to dismiss any employee who is absent without reason for five days in a month. · Article 140. A national unemployment insurance system to be administered by the government under a forthcoming Social Insurance Law is outlined. · Article 166. More disputes are allowed to proceed directly to Court for expedited settlement; this includes disputes involving labor contracts and collective labor agreements, which the Court is now empowered to rule on." Note: The new Labor Code will require additional implementing regulations to take effect and none of the new amendments will come into force until January 1, 2003. http://www.global-standards.com/VietnamUpdate/VietnamUpdate1.htm
Topic: The Politics of Cash Crops I'm going to use one example to show how this plays out in the world, an example that all are familiar with, sugar. The example can be extrapolated to cotton, tobacco, beef, bananas (probably opium) Excerpts from global issues "... Modern economists like to talk about the spin-off effects of certain commodities, that is the extent to which their production results in the development of subsidiary industries. … Sugar production also produced subsidiary economic activities; these included slavery, the provisioning of the sugar producers, shipping, refining, storage, and wholesale and retail trade. … The slave trade was a major factor in the expansion of the sugar industries. … The growing demand for and production of sugar created the plantation economy in the New World and was largely responsible for the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From 1701 to 1810 almost one million slaves were brought to Barbados and Jamaica to work the sugar plantations. … ugar became the focus of an industry, a sugar complex that combined the sugar plantations, the slave trade, long-distance shipping, wholesale and retail trade, and investment finance..." ........................................ "...Sugar affects the environment in numerous ways: * Forests must be cleared to plant sugar * Wood or fossil fuel is needed in processing steps * Waste products from processing affect the environment * Parallel consumption of other items related to sugar, including coffee, tea, chocolate, etc all collectively put additional resource requirements on the environment * Numerous “hidden” or “external” costs include (and this is a very limited set of examples): o To create, maintain and support the office buildings where people work in these industries o To support the marketing o To support efforts in creating demands as well as meeting real and resulting demands o To distribute and sell o To create new ideas and products o To create, maintain and support factories to make the actual products o To create the materials for packaging o To deal with the waste/disposal of these packages o To deal with resulting health problems and the resources used to deal with them o To pay and support lobbyists to help governments and regulation agencies see their perspectives.." ........................................ "... If the cultural, health and economic problems with Coke’s colonization of Latin America weren’t bad enough, it also has a labor record that puts even most other multinational companies to shame. In Guatemala and Colombia, there is strong evidence that the Coca-Cola company actively supported the murders of union activists by paramilitary members at bottling plants run by its subsidiaries and contractors over the years. In Mexico, El Salvador and other countries there have also been ample allegations of the company using paramilitary strength to prevent unionizing and keep employees in line. In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) filed a lawsuit against Coke for the murder of union activist Isidro Gil Segundo and an ongoing campaign of intimidation, terror, murder and paramilitary activity against union members and leaders. Across the board, Coke and its Latin American bottling partners, including Panamco and Bebidas y Alimentos, have waged vicious anti-union campaigns and been accused of rampant illegal labor practices, intimidation techniques, unfair firings and physical attacks. … Today, Coca-Cola plainly stands as an unvarnished symbol of neoliberalism and modern corporate mercantilism. It is, plainly said, a multinational corporation exploiting cheap labor and “emerging markets,” that employs an array of illegal and criminal business “strategies,” and utilizes powerful public relations, marketing and lobbying powers to avoid accountability and fatten the company’s profits just as its product fattens its consumers..." ........................................ "... “Liquid Candy,” a 1999 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, describes who is not benefiting from the beverage industry’s latest marketing efforts: the [United States’s] children. * In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. * Soda consumption among teenage girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. * A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious beverages in the American diet. * Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. * About twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk. Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers. * About one-fifth of the nation’s one—and two-year olds now drink soda. * “In one of the most despicable marketing gambits,” Michael Jacobson, the author of “Liquid Candy” reports, “Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Seven-Up encourage feeding soft drinks to babies by licensing their logos to a major maker of baby bottles, Munchkin Bottling, Inc.” * A 1997 study published in the Journal of Dentistry for Children found that many infants were indeed being fed soda in those bottles...." ........................................ In this post, I have not dealt with other, related effects of cash crops such as how they affect hunger and poverty even in areas of food surplus. For example when buyers decision to not buy cotton at the government prices drove cotton farmers families to dig up tubers to survive http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48641
