Given the worsening world economic crisis, the turn to “green economy” rhetoric looms as a potential saviour, enormously welcome to certain stressed corporations panicking at market chaos in the topsy-turvy fossil fuel, water, infrastructure construction, agriculture and financial sectors.
But the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil this week, devoted to advancing green economy policies and projects, appears as a disaster zone for the people and planet.
No surprise, following the logic of two SA precedents – the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Joburg (Rio+10) and the 17th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban late last year – in which UN sustainability rhetoric was sabotaged by government negotiators acting on behalf of their countries’ polluting and privatising corporations.
I’m here in Rio within a research network – the Barcelona-based Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade – whose intellectual leaders, Joan Martinez-Alier and Joachim Spangenberg, issued a statement cynical about the green economy: “The promises are striking: conserving nature, overcoming poverty, providing equity and creating jobs.
“But the means and philosophy behind it look all too familiar: a stale diet of environmental modernisation reloaded, and freshened up with a significant dose of neo-liberal political thinking.”
Unfortunately, as multinational corporations increasingly dominated the emerging terrain of global environmental governance, the UN Environment Programme came to view “the sustainability crisis as the biggest-ever ‘market failure’.”
This is silly, say the two political-ecologists, for “describing it this way reveals a specific kind of thinking: a market failure means that the market failed to deliver what in principle it could have delivered, and once the bug is fixed the market will solve the problem”.
Martinez-Alier and Spangenberg reverse this logic: “Unsustainable development is not a market failure to be fixed but a market system failure: expecting results from the market that it cannot deliver, like long-term thinking, environmental consciousness and social responsibility.”
This lesson must urgently be considered by the leaders of Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, SA and Tanzania, who signed the Gaborone Declaration last month. It commits them to “quantify and integrate into development and business practice” what ordinary people consider to be the value of nature.
As the declaration insists: “Watersheds, forests, fisheries, coral reefs, soils, and all natural resources, ecosystems and biodiversity constitute our vital natural capital and are central to long-term human well-being, and therefore must be protected from overuse and degradation and, where necessary, must be restored and enhanced.”
However, by terming our environment “natural capital”, the next step is to convert value into price and then sell it on the market.
“The bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for the continued rape of African natural resources,” warns Nnimmo Bassey from the Niger Delta NGO Environmental Rights Action, who also chairs Friends of the Earth International.
Because of inadequate protection against market abuse, “the declaration will help corporate interests in Rio while impoverishing already disadvantaged populations, exacerbate land grabs and displace the poor from their territories”, he adds.
To illustrate, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe once said of the rhino and elephant: “The species must pay to stay.” This allowed him and (white) cronies to offer rich overseas hunters the opportunity to shoot big game for big bucks. The dilemma about hunt marketing is that it doesn’t stop there: black markets in rhino horns and elephant tusks are the incentive for poachers to invade not just poorly defended game parks north of the Limpopo River, but also now in SA.
The alternative strategy would have been to tighten the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) restrictions against trade in ivory.
But SA’s game farm owners and free-market proponents got too greedy, and influenced Pretoria to press for relaxation of the Cites ban. Now, corpses denuded of horns and tusks litter the bush.
The best language in the Gaborone Declaration commits the 10 countries to “reducing poverty by transitioning agriculture, extractive industries, fisheries and other natural capital uses to practices that promote sustainable employment, food security, sustainable energy and the protection of natural capital through protected areas and other mechanisms”.
How, though, is the question.
It is well and good to protect nature through imposing a prohibitive fine and ban on those who pollute, or demanding an “ecological debt” repayment from companies and governments that take too much of the shrinking carbon space left in the environment.
It is another thing, however, to treat nature as “capital” for which a fee for use – at Rio+20, termed “payment for environmental services” – is offered by deep-pocket polluters to continue business as usual. Valuing nature and imposing fines is the approach needed – but given the power balance here, we can instead expect the Earth Summit to promote the pricing of nature based on a fee system and environmental markets, which in effect will give discredited bankers the job of regulating ecology.
Then watch out, people and planet – you will be swamped by hunger for profits.