A few words on the kind of development that is still being implemented by the western countries. One of my sources of information is a commentary by George Monbiot on the Znet, mid-November 2001.
For the mid-November 2001 WTO meeting in Qatar, the members of the quartet - United States, Canada, European Union and Japan - had promised, after the Seattle failure in 1999, to aid the castaways of the new world order. Now it seems that this promise has not been kept.
Actually, the draft statement, which was to be discussed, was very largely written during two meetings, one in Mexico in August and the other in Singapore in October. Although the WTO has 142 members, only 21 nations, the wealthiest and most powerful ones, were permitted to attend. The documents resulting from the meetings were then submitted for approval to the other members, but they were not authorized to make any substantial changes.
As a result, the draft declaration comprises only a very few concessions that the developing countries, which represent the largest part of the world population, had requested. The powerful nations have refused to stop subsidizing exports of meat, grain and sugar: by practising dumping in the weaker countries at artificially low prices, they destroy the local farmers' livelihood.
I must, however, mention, according to a Znet document (1.12.2001), a clause in the WTO Qatar declaration, which will be useful for the fight against aids in the Third World. In fact, this clause, which was the subject of a long battle between the United States, representing the interests of the big pharmaceutical companies, and Brazil, India and Africa, which defended the majority of the 36 million Aids-victims who are to poor to afford expensive medicines, is simple: it states that the set of WTO rules which cover medical patents, "can and must be interpreted and implemented so as to support the right of the WTO members to protect public health and, in particular, to facilitate access to medicines for everyone."
Except for this clause, which allows the Third World to produce much less expensive generic medicines, which we are delighted about, the wealthy countries obtained in Qatar almost all they wanted. Last remark in this respect: less than 10% of the 60 billion dollars spent in the US for pharmaceutical research and development goes into research into medicines intended to the diseases of the poorest 90% of the world population. Derisory research appropriations are indeed reserved for tuberculosis, malaria, sleeping sickness and the varieties of the HIV virus which prevail in the underdeveloped world.
Worse, certain goverments avoid negotiating altogether. For example, the British Department for International Development has decided to bypass WTO and to apply direct pressure on the poorer nations for these to open up their markets to foreign companies. For instance, this Department has stated that in Ghana the money of aid for a water project would be conditional on this country privatizing its water industry.
Without consulting its own people, the Ghana government was forced to double or even to triple the price of water, to prepare the sale of the industry to British, French or American companies. These companies are going to make millions, but already the Ghanaians have to find the water that they need in polluted rivers and ditches, infested with cholera worms, because they cannot pay the new rates.
Furthermore, the unveiling of certain documents proves that, while maintaining a verbally benevolent attitude, the British governement is secretly hand in glove with the lobbies of the business companies and continues deceiving the public and undermining some of the poorest countries. Tony Blair may call that "Development", it is rather commercial piracy.
Is it surprising, when one thinks of those well-known structural adjustment programmes imposed on numerous African countries by the W.B. and the I.M.F. and which were to contribute to developing Subsaharian Africa? A Mali author, among others, Aminata Traoré, in her book "L'Etau" (Actes Sud, 1999), refers to the steamroller of economic globalization and of financial markets, which destroys the human being. This psycho-sociologist, on the basis of concrete facts, wonders what is left of the African nation-state when it is reduced to the political management of the social consequences of neoliberalism and to the maintenance of order through the free circulation of capital. To her and to a large number of Africans, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are propaganda tools of uncontrolled capitalism, which increases poverty and inequalities.
Without forgetting the developing countries' unjustified debt. The 3,5 million deaths in the ex-Belgian Congo war. Or the ten million deaths in Belgian Congo, private property of Léopold II between 1890 and ± 1910, an estimated amount on which several sources agree, including the book by an American researcher, Adam Hochschild, entitled in the French translation "Les Fantômes du Roi Léopold". Without referring to aids and the other wars which are currently ravaging the huge forgotten continent.
For all those hardships, several analysts - too optimistic, no doubt, but does one ever know? - think that Africa is becoming the continent of the future. In a nonsensical world, it recalls that there are other ways of seeing the world and of living than the economic and societal model that locks up human beings in the universe of objects and the dictatorship of the moment, while persisting to make believe that the only valid cogito is from now on: "I sell (or I buy), therefore I am".
It is still true that the number of Third World people who die daily of hunger or malnutrition, including 30,000 childdren, is absolutely scandalous, and should long ago have incited the western countries, ex-colonial powers, to repent openly and give up their guilty inaction.
In the light of the above, it is clear that the non-nuclear peace objectives that we are searching for must also include objectives of fighting for justice, against the world disorder under the hegemony of the United States and their transnational companies. So Peace and Justice: the two main objectives, indissolubly linked, of our work against established powers and interests.
Edgard ANDRE
December 2001