the environmental movement in the global south:
Mahathir has been interpreted in the North as speaking for a South that seeks to catch up whatever the cost and where the environmental movement is weak or non-existent. Today, China is seen as the prime exemplar of this Mahathirian obsession with rapid industrialization with minimal regard for the environment. This view of the South’s perspective on the environment is a caricature. In fact, the environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern to significant sectors of the population of developing countries and, in many of them, the environmental movement has been a significant actor. Moreover, there is currently an active discussion in many countries of alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model.
(...) In both societies (Korea and Taiwan), farmers, workers, and the environment bore the costs of high-speed industrialization. Both societies, it is not surprising, saw the emergence of an environmental movement that was spontaneous, that drew participants from different classes, that saw environmental demands linked with issues of employment, occupational health, and agricultural crisis, and that was quite militant.
(...) Unlike in Korea and Taiwan, environmental movements already existed in a number of the Southeast Asian countries before the period of rapid industrialization, which in their case occurred in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. These movements had emerged in the seventies and eighties in struggles against nuclear power, as in the Philippines; against big hydroelectric dams, as in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and against deforestation and marine pollution, as in Thailand and the Philippines. These were epic battles, like the struggle against the Chico River Dam in the northern Philippines and the fight against the Pak Mun Dam in the northeast of Thailand, which forced the World Bank to withdraw its planned support for giant hydroelectric projects, an outcome that, as we shall see later on, also occurred in struggle against the Narmada Dam in India. The fight against industrial associated partly with foreign firms seeking to escape strict environmental regulations at home was a case of a new front being opened up in an ongoing struggle to save the environment.
(...) The environmental movements in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that reigned there in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, because the environment was not perceived by authoritarian regimes as “political,” organizing around environmental and public health issues was not initially proscribed. Thus environmental struggles became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one more graphic example of a regime’s irresponsibility. In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and Population5. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another.
(...) The environmental crisis in China is very serious. For example, the ground water table of the North China plain is dropping by 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. This region produces 40 percent of China's grain. As environmentalist Dale Wen remarks, “One cannot help wonder about how China will be fed once the ground aquifer is depleted” 6. Water pollution and water scarcity; soil pollution, soil degradation and desertification; global warming and the coming energy crisis—these are all byproducts of China’s high-speed industrialization and massively expanded consumption.
(...) Most of the environmental destabilization in China is produced by local enterprises and massive state projects such as the Three Gorges Dams, but the contribution of foreign investors is not insignificant. Taking advantage of very lax implementation of environmental laws in China, many western TNCs have relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. Wen notes that the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, are the most seriously affected by heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic pollutants) pollution.
(...) Global warming is not a distant threat. The first comprehensive study of the impact of the sea level rise of global warming by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson puts China as the country in Asia most threatened by the sea level rise of up to 10 meters over the next century 8. 144 million of China’s population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and this figure is likely to increase owing to the export-oriented industrialization strategies pursued by the government, which has involved the creation of numerous special economic zones. “From an environmental perspective,” the study warns, “there is a double disadvantage to excessive (and potentially rapid) coastal development. First, uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose residents to seaward hazards such as sea level rise and tropical storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate change”9. The recent spate of super-typhoons descending on the Asian mainland from the Western Pacific underlines the gravity of this observation.
(...) In terms of public health, the rural health infrastructure has practically collapsed, according to Dale Wen. The system has been privatized with the introduction of a “fee for service” system that is one component of the neoliberal reform program. One result is the resurgence of diseases that had been brought under control, like tuberculosis and schistosomiasis. Cuba, in contrast, has won plaudits for its rural health care system, which is ironic, says Wen, given that the Cuban system was based on the Maoist era’s “barefoot doctor” system.
(...) The combination of the industrialization of food production and the lengthening of the food chain from production to consumption is strongly suspected to be the cause of bird flu, which has migrated from China to other countries. The government has become an unreliable actor in dealing with new diseases such as bird flu and SARS, prone as it is to engage in minimizing the threat if not promoting a cover-up, as it did in the case of SARS.
(...) As in Taiwan and Korea 15 years earlier, we see unrestrained export-oriented industrialization bringing together low-wage migrant labor, farming communities whose lands are being grabbed or ruined environmentally, environmentalists, and the proponents of a major change in political economy called the “New Left.” Environment-related riots, protests and disputes in China increased by 30% in 2005 to more than 50,000, as pollution-related unrest has become “a contagious source of instability in the country,” as one report put it. Indeed, a great many of recorded protests fused environmental, land-loss, income, and political issues. From 8700 in 1995, what the Ministry of Public Security calls "mass group incidents" have grown to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004 11. Notable were the April 2005 riots in Huashui, where an estimated 10,000 police officers clashed with desperate villagers who succeeded in repelling strong vested interests polluting their lands.
(...) As in China, the environment and public health have been sites of struggle in India. Over the last 25 years, the movement for the environment and public health has exploded in that country. Indeed, one can say that this movement has become one of the forces that is deepening Indian democracy.
(...) Here Roy expresses an essential truth: that centralized electrification preempted the development of alternative power-systems that could have been more decentralized, more people-oriented, more environmentally benign, and less capital intensive.
(...) While these interests benefited, others paid the costs. Specifically, it was the rural areas and the environment that absorbed the costs of centralized electrification. Tremendous crimes have been committed in the name of power generation and irrigation, says Roy, but these were hidden because governments never recorded these costs. In India, Roy calculates that large dams have displaced about 33 million people in the last 50 years, about 60 per cent of them being either untouchables or indigenous peoples
(...) Equally important was the broader political impact of the Narmada struggle. It proved to be the cutting edge of the social movements that have deepened India’s democracy and transformed the political scene. The state bureaucracy and political parties must now listen to these movements or risk opposition or, in the case of parties, being thrown out of power. Social movements in the rural areas played a key role in stirring up the mass consciousness that led to the defeat in 2004 of the neoliberal coalition led by the Hindu chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) that had campaigned on the pro-globalization slogan “India Shining.” While its successor, the Congress Party-led coalition, has turned its back on the rural protest that led to its election and followed the same anti-agriculture and pro-globalization policies of the BJP, it risks provoking an even greater backlash in the near future.
(...) As in China, the challenge lies in building up a mass movement that might be unpopular not only with the elite but also with sections of the urban-based middle class sectors that have been the main beneficiaries of the high-growth economic strategy that has been pursued since the early 1990’s.
(...) The reason for tracing the evolution of a mass-based environmental movement in East Asia and India is to counter the image that the Asian masses are inert elements that uncritically accept the environmentally damaging high-growth export-oriented industrialization models promoted by their governing elites. It is increasingly clear to ordinary people throughout Asia that the model has wrecked agriculture, widened income inequalities, led to increased poverty after the Asian financial crises, and wreaked environmental damage everywhere.
(...) There is no doubt that the burden of adjustment to global warming will fall on the North, and that this adjustment will have to be made in the next 10 to 15 years, and that the adjustment needed might need to be much greater than the 50 per cent reduction from the 1990’s level by 2050 that is being promoted by the G 8. In the eyes of some experts, what might be required is in the order of 100 or 150 per cent reduction from 1990 levels. However, the South will also have to adjust, proportionately less than the North but also rather stringently.
(...) The South’s adjustment will not take place without the North taking the lead. But it will also not take place unless its leaders junk the export-oriented, high-growth paradigm promoted by the World Bank and most economists to which its elites and many middle strata are addicted.