The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [102]
In early 2008, a front page article in the New York Times reminded me of that eye-opening visit to Haiti. The USAID plan has been effective: by 2008 Haiti was importing 80 percent of its rice. This made it very vulnerable to fluctuations in global rice supply and price. The combination of rising fuel costs, a severe drought, and in some places the diversion of water to more lucrative crops had lowered worldwide rice production. As a result, global rice prices tripled over a few months in early 2008, leaving thousands of Haitians simply unable to afford this staple food. The newspaper ran haunting pictures of Haitians who had resorted to eating dirt pies, held together with bits of lard or butter, in order to have some substance in their stomachs.125
I thought of that USAID man and burned with anger. Had his agency devoted its resources to supporting farmers in developing sustainable farming practices, rather than investing in infrastructure and polices favoring garment factories and export processing, a drought in Australia would not have made people starve in Haiti, literally a half a planet away. And this, in a nutshell, is the legacy of the global trade and “development” institutions.
The Local Alternative
Once again, at this stage in the Story of Stuff, we’re running into limits. A major limit comes with the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the mandate to cut carbon emissions, both of which will hobble the whole system of global logistics, transport, and freight that is currently in place. Another limit comes as the developing countries get fed up with providing the resources and cheap labor that support our bloated consumer lifestyle, while they struggle to meet basic human needs. Increasingly, they’re rejecting this imposed division of labor and demanding to be able to chart their own development paths.
Perhaps the highest profile example of a country refusing to play by IFI rules was the case of the so-called Water Wars in Bolivia. The World Bank and IMF require borrowing countries to open their markets to foreign companies and privatize state-owned enterprises, including utilities. Bolivia complied and in 1999 privatized the water service in its third largest city, Cochabamba, entering into a 40 year contract with an international consortium of corporations led by U.S.-based Bechtel. Because privatization of utilities often results in extreme rate hikes and decreased services for the poor, citizens of Cochabamba worried what this would mean for their access to water. They had ample cause for concern, as it turned out.
By 2000, water rates had increased up to 200%. In a city with a minimum wage of less than $100 a month, many people were paying a quarter of their monthly income on water. Even rain that fell into the residents’ rainwater harvesting systems was considered the private property of Bechtel. Peasants who needed the water for irrigation, low income residents, students, workers and many others joined widespread protests demanding the removal of the foreign lead consortium. At first, the government refused, worried about the signal that such a move would send foreign investors, but when the public protests escalated, eventually resulting in 175 injuries, 2 people being blinded, and a police shooting of an unarmed 17 year old caught on film, it relented, revoking the contract and returning water management to the public utility which promised to manage water as a social good, not a commodity.126
I’d also say that even here in the land of Wal-Mart and Amazon, consumers are getting tired of the frenetic pace of things. In a sense it is impressive that companies can now make, design, ship, and sell a T-shirt in a couple of weeks, when it used to take months. But to what end? Trendy clothes and gadgets don’t actually make life better. In fact, virtually everyone