Patrick Bond
If
you had a choice, which host city would you choose for Rio+10, a.k.a. the 2002
`World Summit on Sustainable Development,’ where 60,000 delegates will jawjaw
about social and environmental problems, maybe in the process constructing more
bits of a global state? Let’s do a quick scan of the site picked by the UN last
month: Johannesburg, South Africa.
The
main Rio+10 conference will take place in what passes for Jo’burg’s new business
district, a hedonistic edge-city called Sandton. It’s about fifteen miles north
of the traditional city centre where, during the 1890s gold rush, the old
Central Business District was first originally built–and then many times
rebuilt, to ultimately welcome Africa’s most intimidating concrete canyons.
But
from an investor’s standpoint, democracy wasn’t good for that part of town.
Beginning in the late 1980s, black South Africans were allowed into the CBD
without their `passbooks.’ Now, even luxury office blocks–such as the Carlton
Centre, Africa’s tallest building at 50 stories–are now valued at 5-10% of
their replacement cost, thanks to mass white-capitalist disinvestment and bank
redlining.
Over
the past decade, virtually all Jo’burg’s white-run corporations fled the
desegregating inner-city and instead built a huge, faux- Italian `public’ square
in the southern hemisphere’s plushest suburb. Sandton Square was quickly
surrounded by skyscrapers, banks (including a brand new Citibank tower),
boutiques for the ubiquitous nouveau-riche, 5-star hotels, a garish convention
centre, Africa’s biggest stock exchange and other architectural detritus
showcasing brazen economic power.
Given
South Africa’s crime hysteria, a fortress mentality prevails in Sandton.
Jo’burg’s cutting-edge high-tech surveillance systems, staffed by poverty-level
black security-sector workers, compare closely to Los Angeles’ Bonaventura Hotel
and would give author Mike Davis even more raw material conjoining conspicuous
consumption norms, insulate!-psychology, phallic symbolism, and a profoundly
distorted political economy. And as for transplanting mediterranean themes to
the African high- veld, you can imagine the culture clash.
(As
an aside, Christmas week saw a vibrant power struggle between South African
security guards and their sweatshop-style employers. While small black-run
security firms agreed to union demands for a minimum monthly wage of
US$200–hardly compensating for no perks and life- threatening work guarding the
rich in the world’s most unequal country–this was considered an excessive sum
by the white- owned firms, many of which are run by ex- cops from apartheid
times. That struggle continues, too.)
Just
a couple of miles to the east lives Sandton’s reserve army of labour, in an
impoverished township called Alexandra, home to an estimated 300,000 people
crammed into just over two square miles of mainly squalid housing. (A book by my
friend Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics, published by Monthly Review five
years ago, is still an excellent guide to Alexandra, because tragically little
has changed since apartheid.) Last week, in the murky Jukskei River which cuts
through the township, there was an outbreak of cholera, brought (say
epidemiologists) by Zulu migrant-workers returning to the city from the holiday
break. The national epidemic has already sickened 25,000 people, leaving 72
dead, with 500 more contracting the killer disease every day.
The
reason is simple: nearly seven years after apartheid ended, most South Africans
still rely upon untreated water, and there has been virtually no installation of
even inexpensive rural pit-latrine sanitation since 1994. (As I mentioned in my
December 5 ZNet Commentary, the disease’s epicentre, last August, was deep in
the rural KwaZulu- Natal ex-homeland, where piped water was cut off to destitute
people who couldn’t pay a $7 connection fee, having had free water supplied by
the apartheid regime for 17 years prior.)
The
apartheid-era migrant labour system is still dominant today, based on sustained
patriarchy which has rural women carrying many of the labour-reproduction costs
that a normal capitalist economy would internalise. Add to this the unserviced
shack settlements which have popped up in many Jo’burg environs and you get a
lethal mix, a public health bomb, detonated again and again by poverty,
unemployment, evictions of poor people from formal townships, and cutoffs of
municipal services like water and electricity.
Contributing
to the madness, Jo’burg’s lead bureaucrats announced last week, just as the
cholera bug appeared, that they would redouble their `credit control’ system
against people not paying for services, by cutting off yet more poor residents.
And then provincial bureaucrats announced, early this week, that they would
begin mass evictions of tens of thousands of long-time Alexandra residents
living in shacks along the Jukskei, in a two- week exercise reminiscent of
apartheid forced removals (except not on race grounds now, we have instead
full-blown class- apartheid). People will be moved dozens of miles away to other
already-overcrowded shantytowns (many will resist).
In
such a lethal zone of contradiction, political friction can be enlightening, as
global and local pressures blend. For example, one sunny summer afternoon last
month, I joined my friends Fernando Bejarano and Neil Tangri, who, with some
Greenpeace activists, carried off a couple of spirited demonstrations at the
Sandton Convention Centre. The glitzy Centre–the main staging point for
Rio+10–was hosting an international conference dedicated to regulating
`Persistent Organic Pollutants’ (POPs) in early December. Fernando and Neil
explained that once again, the official US delegation was the fly in the
ointment. (True, the host South African government was also opposed to a
conference resolution prohibiting all uses of toxics; Pretoria allows the
spraying of DDT in malaria-infested areas, arguing unconvincingly that all other
measures have failed.)
It
looked like a repeat of the anti-landmines conference (which Clinton eschewed to
the US’ shame), or the previous month’s debacle in The Hague, where stubborn
Washington officials blocked `progress’ on the Kyoto Protocol (aimed at slowing
global warming). Even that sickly deal on CO2-emissions is based on a
pollution-trading strategy that, environmental economist Peter Dorman warns,
will raise the floor to the ceiling, because under emissions-trading, countries
can sell rights to pollute (instead of themselves generating all the CO2
permissible, which may not be otherwise economical). So Clinton’s team managed
to reduce pressure on the US to cut its obscene contribution to global warming.
And moreover, through the commodification of clean air–a strategy warmly
endorsed by the World Bank and other neoliberals–Kyoto’s maximum emissions
become guaranteed minimums in any case. For the environment, Kyoto-Hague was a
lose-lose proposition.
Here
I finally come to my point. It is precisely because of such attempts at
international `regulation’ of environmental problems created by the market
(e.g., global warming), *using tools of the market* (like emissions-trading),
that I so firmly mistrust what passes these days for `global governance,’
`global public goods’ (as punted by James Wolfensohn, always in search of a
fresh mandate), and especially the United Nations `global compact’ with dozens
of the world’s largest and most irresponsible corporations. Their talkshops–
invariably in First World conference centres, sometimes like last month in
shouting distance of Third World urban catastrophes– rarely make a difference.
But
to play devil’s advocate, the POPs conference did ultimately deliver some nice-
sounding language. Fernando, a former farmworker organiser with Cesar Chavez, is
Mexico’s leading anti-pesticide campaigner, while activist-intellectual Neil
labours for the excellent Healthcare Without Harm international advocacy network
out of Ralph Nader’s Washington offices. As the conference closed, the two
now-groggy activists stopped by after intense lobbying sessions to celebrate
with a beer at my house on the way to the airport. They confirmed that at the
last minute, in the wee hours of the morning, some left-leaning delegates pushed
the US position to the wall on several particularly nasty chemicals.
Was
this an exception, then? Perhaps, but typically such international conventions
must still be ratified (and that’s Jesse Helms’ department). Most are merely
nation-to- nation contracts, and if the US violates them, a country (like Haiti,
for example) which receives a toxic gift (ash from Philadelphia a few years ago)
must bear an enormous financial burden to contest the US (and its deep-pocket
corporates) in the International Court of Justice.
Another
local example unveils some political limits of global regulation. At merely a
personal level, my own environmental consciousness-raising came from realising
that Jo’burg water is now increasingly sourced from a massive dam-complex in
Lesotho, several hundred kilometres south of here. In one of the world’s most
impressive cross-catchment projects, water shoots down from the Maluti Mountains
into the river systems that supply Jo’burg, through a tunnel 42 kilometres long,
built at a cost of $2.5 billion. But the dams that make this happen are
fundamentally flawed, as an excellent international team of researchers and
community activists have been revealing (the multifaceted case is too complex to
simplify, but can be found at http://www.queensu.ca/msp under documents).
Thanks
especially to help from the International Rivers Network, Center for
International Environmental Law and Environmental Defense Fund, community
activists in Alexandra have been fighting to stop the dams and instead make rich
white Jo’burgers pay more to water their english gardens and fill their swimming
pools, and force the municipality to repair apartheid-era leaking pipes through
which half the township water drains out before reaching the people. They
recently joined with Lesotho rural groups to demand a moratorium on further
Lesotho dam- building, due to the project’s many violations of best-practice
recommendations made by yet another international assembly: the `World
Commission on Dams,’ sponsored by the World Bank and environmental group IUCN.
The
activists have regularly complained not only to Lesotho officials and the South
African government–especially the then- water minister, Kader Asmal, chair of
the World Commission on Dams–but to the project’s main organiser, the Bank
itself. The Bank’s in-house `Inspection Panel’ is meant to provide oversight so
its Board can cancel unsound projects. But because of politics (not sound
technical reasoning) the Panel outright refused to consider–even fully
investigate–the activists’ case. (No point in offending or embarrassing Asmal,
they seemed to reason; having once opposed the Lesotho dams as a case of
apartheid sanctions-busting, Asmal in 1998 gave the go-ahead for expanding the
controversial project.)
To
name at least one name, it was Jim MacNeill, the Bank Inspection Panel’s key
staffer–and formerly secretary of the Brundtland Commission (which popularised
the ghastly phrase `sustainable development’);–who surmised that Asmal had
introduced a sustainable water services policy to South Africa. Thus the Bank
could ignore the Alexandra residents’ plight, and specifically their case
against the expensive, unnecessary, corrupt, ecologically- catastrophic and
distributionally-unfair Lesotho dams. (I’d now like to invite Jim back to
Jo’burg, to have a sip of Alexandra’s Jukskei River water, just for a taste of
sustainability.)
Again,
the point is that the international struggle to stop large dams, whether in
Sardar Sarovar, India or Lesotho-Alexandra, was shunted into an international
conference setting, where progressive activists and researchers waged a struggle
to add decent language to the final language. (Telling, however, was a minority
rider to the report by Medha Patkar, the guru of the international anti-dams
movement, and inspiration for defending the Narmada River.) Predictably, the SA
government and World Bank ignored the activists’ request for a moratorium on
Lesotho’s dams.
Back
to the Sandton Convention Centre. Those of you readers who’ll join us here
protesting at the Rio+10 `World Summit on Sustainable Development’ next year,
will be happy to know that South Africa’s best environmentalists, union
organisers and social/community activists are already making preparations.
Alexandra will host one of the most exciting `convergence centres’ of
progressive activists yet established.
For
as Sandton puts out red carpets to Citibank and other toxic corporations so as
to attract more tenants to its luxury buildings (the corpos might otherwise go
to beautiful Cape Town, steamy Durban or the Jo’burg-Pretoria highway strip
called Midrand), it strikes me yet again that the only way to stop such
self-destructive competition between cities is to put sufficient political
pressure on our nation-states to reject the international economic power
structure, no matter how much it is camouflaged by the best-meaning UN
conferencing.
That
economic pressure comes, in its most direct manifestation, from the *real*
embryonic world state–the IMF, World Bank and WTO–which is a veritable boot on
a Third World leader’s neck. (In other research, I’ve been tracing the cholera
in KwaZulu-Natal and Alexandra directly to World Bank advisors, who claimed two
years ago to have been `instrumental’ in determining SA’s water pricing system.)
This spring, US university students and socially-responsible investment
advocates will be helping some of the best South African activists attempt to
defund–and some of us hope, close down–the World Bank (http://www.worldbankboycott.org)
In
fairness, though, I will close by introducing next month’s column, a review of
the excellent new book by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith–
`Globalization from Below’ (South End Press)–which takes a somewhat different
point of view. Stay tuned, for more of this debate on whether to reform, or
smash, the global state… a debate that may, depending upon strategy and the
balance of forces, culminate at Rio+10 right here in Jo’burg.