International Archives

Loathing, lies and liberation theology

Multinational corporations duke it out in the Andes

Paul Driessen

LA OROYA, Peru – Pitched battles over ideology and public policy certainly are not confined to classrooms or legislative chambers. They are also fought in poor communities of Africa, Asia and Latin America, often pitting multinational corporations against multinational activist groups.

The corporations seek to extract energy and minerals, provide much-needed jobs and capital, and serve investors and consumers – without harming human health or the environment. They often collide with well-connected global activists who loathe foreign investment, free enterprise, and especially extractive industries – and want to influence elections and policies in these regions.

This town, high in the Andes east of Lima, is one such battleground. La Oroya developed around a metallurgical facility that produces raw materials for computers, medical devices and other modern marvels. Built in 1922, the facility was a major polluter for decades.

In October 1997, a company that is now Doe Run Peru bought the complex from government-owned Centromin Peru. Doe Run eliminated heavy-metal discharges into local rivers, began converting old slag piles into grasslands, and implemented safety procedures that enabled employees to work 7 million man-hours without a lost-time accident. It has already reduced particulate emissions 35 percent from late 1997 levels, and sulfur dioxide (SO2) by one-fifth. The company has requested a four-year extension for completing the SO2 emissions control system, but by 2011 the entire facility will comply with all Peruvian environmental standards.

Last year, at Doe Run’s invitation, I visited Peru with two Catholic priests, to see the operation firsthand. The environmental compliance work was impressive. However, after we explored the town and met its mayor and numerous citizens, what really stood out were programs whose primary purpose was improving the quality of life in the region.

Doe Run has financed or conducted hundreds of projects, mostly suggested by the locals. It constructed a municipal sanitary landfill, paved roads to reduce dust and accidents, and improved schools, built a youth center and clinic, and helped plant 100,000 trees and acres of flowers.

“Many homes here don’t have bathrooms or even running water,� Nilda Gómez told us. Now families can go to public laundry and shower facilities that cost little or nothing to use.

The company also sponsored cleft palate surgeries for 200 children, and jewelry making, pastry baking, electronics and business management classes for local people. They, in turn, have opened scores of new businesses. Most are home-based, but a bakery now employs eight workers, including Emilia Hinostroza, whose speech disabilities previously had prevented her from holding a job.

To improve agriculture in hamlets up to 30 miles away, Doe Run removed debris from water canals and tunnels; builds reservoirs and irrigation systems; imports better breeds of grass, sheep, alpaca and cattle; trains farmers in land management and animal husbandry; and provides medicines and medical treatment for animals.

The hard work and $140 million investment (through 2005) have improved environmental quality and created a new sense of pride, ownership and hope for the region’s 50,000 people. At a union-organized event, we were mobbed by happy parents and children who shouted “Viva Doe Run� and said their lives had improved more in the past seven years than in the previous 75.

These efforts epitomize “corporate social responsibility.� And yet, the company and community are under constant attack by local Archbishop Pedro Baretto and US-based activists led by Oxfam. They have insinuated themselves as “stakeholders,� say Doe Run hasn’t done enough to address blood-lead levels, and strongly object to the SO2 deadline extension.

In fact, Doe Run made the decades-old lead contamination problem its top priority from the outset. The company tests workers and children regularly, reduced lead emissions at their source, built facilities that ensure workers don’t take contaminants home, and initiated programs to clean streets and homes of accumulated contamination. Blood-lead levels now meet US (OSHA) guidelines for nearly all workers, and the children’s blood-lead levels are improving.

Frustrated that the union and residents overwhelmingly support extending the SO2 deadline, the activists constantly lie about these health issues and Doe Run’s efforts and intentions. Many suspect they also want to turn public opinion against mining and foreign investment, and tilt Peru’s presidential race toward Ollanta Humala, a left-wing Hugo Chavez protégé.

La Oroyans deeply resent what they feel is interference by unelected “outsiders� who ignore their views and have no real stake in what eventually happens. “We are the ones who live here,� Mayor Clemente Quincho noted. “We want the archbishop to listen to us, not just make statements and demands.�

Vice Mayor Clariza Amanzo criticized Archbishop Baretto’s “dialogue� process as one-sided. Numerous facilities still pollute the region’s air and water, she emphasized, so he should invite “our people and all the companies, not just Doe Run and people he wants to speak.� Indeed, when I participated in a meeting at the archbishop’s magnificent residence, not one of his “representatives� said anything remotely echoing what I had heard during three days of meetings, tours and interviews.

What their statements did reflect is a commitment to liberation theology, which one of the priests described as “Marxism painted over with a thin veneer of Christian moralizing about class struggle, the supposed illegitimacy of private enterprise, and ultimately the asserted need for radical redistribution of limited wealth.� Worse, it undermines the very goals it advocates, by preventing the foreign investment, technological progress and wealth creation necessary for people to improve their physical and social environment.

Oxfam, Christian Aid and US-based Presbyterian Church groups certainly can afford to support projects like those Doe Run has initiated – thereby buttressing their assertions that they care about the needs of people they supposedly champion. However, aside from sponsoring duplicative blood-lead studies and spending probably millions to attack Doe Run and thwart La Oroya’s interests, they have done nothing.

Town officials say the activists expressed no concern about health or pollution until well after Doe Run arrived. Now that a US company is operating the facility, the agitators want decades of mismanagement and pollution reversed overnight.

A greater worry is that, if they manage to prevent the SO2 extension or shut down the smelter, the activists’ concern for “the children� will evaporate. That’s what happened when Oxfam’s radical soulmates succeeded in banishing DDT from disease control programs, and left millions to die of malaria in Latin America and, even more tragically, in Africa.

Then newly-jobless workers and families would be forced into subsistence farming, coca growing, or scraping by in Lima’s slums. Meanwhile, the agitators would simply return to their comfortable homes in Boston, Washington and London – until they hoist their eco-socialist banners against the next ascendant village they choose to victimize.

The people of La Oroya deserve better than that.

______________

Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death. Doe Run sponsored his trip, but the observations and opinions presented here are his alone.

“The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That's an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.

"During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.”

Schroeder's comments are cut from the same cloth as his environmental minister Jurgen Trittin's suggestions on the heels of Hurricane Katrina that but for the US refusal to join in Kyoto, Katrina may have been weaker. This leads to my second point: Even if: (a) global warming intensifies hurricanes, an iffy proposition at best, and (b) the U.S. and other developed nations had implemented a Kyoto-like regime say, 10 years ago, it would have had no discernible effect on global warming or, more important, the strength of Katrina.

The weird thing is that while Trittin came in for some criticism in the German media, much of the criticism was based on the insensitive timing of his remarks, not the egregious substance of his statement that emission reductions would have reduced Katrina's power.

Clearly, the Germans can match the junkscience on our side of the Atlantic with their own junkerscience -- ja?

Notes

1. Data from: EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database, available at www.em-dat.net - Université Catholique de Louvain - Brussels - Belgium, October 12, 2005.

2. By contrast, Katrina's final death toll was about 1,200.

3. Goklany, I.M. 2005. “A Climate Policy for the Short and Medium Term: Stabilization or Adaptation?” Energy & Environment 16: 667-680 (2005).

(a) broadly advancing sustainable development (particularly in developing countries since that would generally enhance their adaptive capacity to cope with numerous problems that currently beset them, including climate-sensitive problems),
(b) reducing vulnerabilities to climate-sensitive problems that are urgent today and might be exacerbated by future climate change,
(c) implementing “no-regret” emission reduction measures while at the same time striving to expand the universe of such measures through research and development of cleaner and more affordable technologies, and
(d) monitor climate, climate change and their impacts so we can subtantially mitigate, if not foretall, nasty events and/or surprises (such as Katrina, Rita or the drought in Niger, whether or not they are caused by climate change).

Such a policy would help solve current urgent problems facing humanity while preparing it to face future problems that might be caused or exacerbated by climate change.

Notes
[1] DATA SOURCES: For deaths: "EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database," available at http://www.em-dat.net, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium; for population: from 1900-1925, McEvedy, C. and R. Jones, (1978), Atlas of World Population History, New York, Penguin; from 1950-2004, World Resources Institute, "Earth Trends," available at http://www.wri.org; from 1926-1949, interpolated for each year using the 1925 estimate from McEvedy and Jones and the 1950 WRI estimate assuming exponential population growth. For 2004, I excluded the deaths due to the Boxing Day Tsunami disaster (which, according to EM-DATA killed 226,435 people). Data on deaths, in particular, are approximate and, probably, more prone to error as we go further into the past.

A few comments Astronauts are given training in detecting major areas of environmental degradation that can easily be viewed from space. After all, we are approaching a half century of amassing detailed photos of the Earth's surface from space. And they are trained to watch for areas of Amazonia and the Congo tropical forests and compare amounts of deforestation with photos from 10, 20, 30 years ago. Likewise watching for how far out into the oceans the silt plumes from the major rivers extend. Or for expansion of the great Sahelian Desert further south into sub-Saharan Africa.

After all, it was the very first astronauts who looked down and Adalai Stevenson who looked at the photos, who remarked on the view of this tiny little ball of blue and green drifting through the enormity of time and space and remarked that it was our only home and that it appeared fragile and that we should take care of it. Spaceship Earth. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. We should all want to be stewards of our homes and home. But it is more their attitude and what they are looking for. NASA, EPA and the Greens have been trying desperately to turn the Space Program into an Earth Observation program -- the Mission to Planet Earth -- for almost 20 years, to thus justify perpetual funding as part of the nation's and world's environmental protection mission -- and thus not have to constantly justify space walks, manned missions, Moon landings, whatever.

The crap in all this is that everything is evaluated simply in areal extent. Gee the desert is larger -- thus man is evil or development is. They never get at causes or incentives. Why do the tropical forests continue to decline? Does NASA or White House Science Advisor ever suggest any institutional factors? No one owns the forests and people in many of those countries live in dire poverty in nations with no free market economies, no jobs, no food Thus their only choice is felling the forests, raising crops and livestock, and hoping they can sell some of the rare forest woods in the illegal markets -- that the G-8 and Tony Blair were so concerned about. Or that Amazonian states continue to urge the teeming populous of Brazil's coastal cities to move into the border areas and clear the forests and create boom towns. Perhaps enitre regions of Africa would not have to subsist on "bush meat" if their dictators would allow Frank Purdue to start up some chicken farms.

They might actually gather some good data if they took extensive infra-red photos of the US forests to document the extent of all the unhealthy forests -- the millions upon millions of acres of dead and dying trees -- from over-crowding, disease, bark beetle infestations, whatever. All the failed results of environmental policies forced on our National Forests by the Greens. All the things that the Bush Healthy Forest Initiative was supposed to help start repairing. And which much of the nation still doesn't believe is actually happening, preferring to believe the HFI was passed to pay off the Bush administration's Big Timber donors.

More striking I think is Reuters' header: "Environmental damage on Earth seen from shuttle." Like helloo? That is the major issue at this moment? I don't think they are really certain that they can get that puppy home safely. Every time they get another picture they find a missing or cracked tile, insulation padding sticking out between tiles, torn insulation blankets. Questions of whether any falling lift-off debris might have caused microscopic cracks in the carbon wing edges, etc. And Reuters is going on about damage to Earth. How about attention to environmental damage to this shuttle. Talk about Green bias of the media, that that would be the lead story.

And where is Archie Bunker when we need him? Where in the world did they find that total ditz Eileen Collins? Talk about a Ding Bat! She had seen "widespread environmental damage", whatever that may be. "Sometimes you can see how there is erosion." Again, helloo? That is one of the most fundamental and basic processes on the planet. There is uplift and there is erosion. The two biggies. What are wind and rain and freezing and thawing supposed to do? Erode. "And you can see how there is deforestation." Again so what? And why? Yes, but why do you suppose the trees get replanted in the vast clear-cuts of the giant timber companies, but not in mankind's common tropical forests?

"We would like to see...people take good care of the Earth and replace the resources that have been used." Like refill copper mines with more copper or start pumping crude oil into depleted reservoirs?

"We don't have much air." Like people are using it all up by breathing. How did she possibly qualify to command the mission? That crap wouldn't even be accepted for the Children's Page of the Washington Post.

Ms Collins might just start spending a little time worrying about how she's going to get her rearend safely back to Terra Firma -- even if it is so badly polluted. Home, sweet home; be it ever so humble.

Goklany notes that current evidence does not sustain the notion that climate change is the greatest threat to public health or the environment today. His study shows that diverting scarce resources towards feeble and ineffectual mitigation strategies such as the Kyoto treaty would hurt our abilities to respond to any future environmental challenges. Specifically, he shows that a completely successful Kyoto Protocol, despite costing $125 billion annually, would have negligible positive effects on global agriculture production, malaria, water resources, global forest area, or costal wetlands. The study notes that, at best, Kyoto might reduce sea level rise by 1.4 inches (!) by 2080. Goklany concludes that spending scarce resources directly on addressing today’s urgent public health and environmental threats, and advancing economic development, would not only solve today's urgent problems but it would also advance the ability to solve any environmental problems that might occur tomorrow, including climate change.

The topic of the panel in which I participated - 'is private ownership the future of sustainable development?' - analysed the role of institutions in attaining sustainable development, arguing that sustainable development is a process, not an outcome. This distinction is important, but generally not well understood.

The press release says that

The huge 3 tonne figure stands 7 metres high and is totally composed of WEEE – from washing machines to mobile phones and electronic toys. This represents the amount of waste that a single person in the UK is likely to produce in a lifetime.

The article discusses the problem of privately subsidized recycling schemes, that are common in the developed countries and that may in certain circumstances harm the environment of developing countries, as a result of the asymmetry in economic development and environmental protection between them and the developed countries where the products originate. This may happen, for instance, when such products are exported to developing countries and have a negative impact on the economic viability of collection and recycling of their own waste. Newly established and still struggling recycling plants, unsupported by private or governmental subsidies or other protective measures prevailing in the rich and more environmentally conscious countries, may be forced to close down. Alternatively, they may decide to abandon expensive collection of local waste, in favor of free or subsidized waste imported from developed countries. In both cases, collection and recycling activities in the importing countries are reduced, and sometimes eliminated. The objective of this article is to document and draw attention to this problem, that has not yet been discussed in the rich literature on trade & environment, and to examine the question of what remedies, if any, may be offered under international trade law (in particular GATT/WTO rules) to affected countries. Would countries in situations as those described above be permitted to take measures against imports harming their recycling activities? Of particular interest in this regard, is how to relate to privately paid, but governmentally induced, subsidies under the WTO Subsidies Agreement? Such subsidies, while fulfilling most economic definitions of subsidies, appear to have escaped the attention of the Agreement's drafters and may therefore be outside its scope. Importing member countries would therefore be precluded from taking countervailing measures against products enjoying such subsidies. These and other potential protective measures will be discussed in the article, in light of recent case law of the WTO, in particular in the matter of United States - Measures Treating Export Restraints as Subsidies. This discussion will demonstrate the formalistic nature of the existing WTO jurisprudence and show how a more purposive, teleological approach to interpretation of international trade rules could lead to a better solution to the problem at hand.

Goldberg writes:

Broadly speaking, environmentalists want to end poverty, hunger, and disease, but they also want to keep indigenous cultures unchanged. But you can't have both simultaneously. It is the natural state of indigenous cultures, after all, to be constantly vulnerable to disease and hunger, and no man fighting to keep his children alive cares about "biodiversity."

For decades, environmentalists pointed to various calamities and boasted that they were identifying the problems, which is the first step for providing a solution. But they were wrong; environmental distress is a symptom of political and economic corruption. There's reason to hope the United Nations has finally recognized the real problem, and that's great news.

Taverne writes as a layman interested in science, calling himself a "passionate believer in the importance of reason and truth":

I believe non-scientists and especially politicians who are concerned about the interaction of science with society should take special care to try to understand and evaluate scientific evidence about controversial questions of the day. (p.11)

Bozeman’s extended spell of vernal temperatures spurs thoughts of global warming. The preponderance of scientific evidence shows that for whatever reasons (human-induced carbon emissions, natural climatic variation), average global temperatures are increasing. The important question is: What do we do about it?

The most common arguments revolve around reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. But this reduction harms the least well off. The money and resources spent on marginal reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would do far more to protect and save human lives if directed toward Third World economic and technological development.

In 1999, Yale economists William Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer estimated the net global cost of the Kyoto Protocol at $716 billion. By comparison (http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/), for less than $50 billion we could greatly reduce malnutrition and control malaria in the developing world. Kyoto enthusiasts retort that the Protocol is just a first step in establishing a framework for future emission reductions. In the meantime, those most vulnerable to drastic climatic events, the world’s poor, will not be any better protected by the developed world’s collective penance.

As Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke describe it in a January 17 New Republic article, “Prescribing emissions reductions to forestall the future effects of disasters is like telling someone who is sedentary, obese, and alcoholic that the best way to improve his health is to wear a seat belt.”

But the radical Greens of the left reject economic progress. They hate free-market capitalism and fear the individual freedom, prosperity, and technological success such a system creates. Never mind that the wealth fostered by free markets funds such environmental fundamentalists -- and real environmental improvements.

The Green fundamentalist position reminds me of the last century’s disastrous experiments in central planning. They see human nature as malleable, a project for socially engineered “improvement.” This implies an underlying contempt for humanity. No longer do individuals possess inherent value; they are disposable to further “the cause.”

For example, Neo-Luddite environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale advocates a return to a more primitive way of life: “Tribes have long-established practices to keep themselves harmonious and stable, including the practice of birth control.... You can call it infanticide if you like; they would understand it as birth control, appropriate to their regard for nature.” For botanist Sandra Knapp, “Our species was (and still is!) an invasive mammalian weed.” Ecologist William Rees sees humans as “the most voracious predators in the world’s oceans and, simultaneously, the most successful terrestrial carnivore ever to have walked the Earth....” In a 1990 academic journal article, anthropologist Warren Hern described “the similarity of the human species to a cancerous process” and declared, “The human species is a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic species.” (In plain English: Evil, destructive humans consume everything in sight.) No wonder, then, the Greens’ hostility to human progress.

At the global scale this attitude manifests in (further) inhuman policies from the U.N. Sarewitz and Pielke report that the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change “refused to fund disaster preparedness efforts at its last conference in December unless states could demonstrate exactly how the disasters they feared were linked to climate change.” Concern for a phenomenon with ill-defined effects trumps human lives.

A more humanitarian policy toward climate change would seek to lift up the world’s poor, helping them build the resources and resilience to withstand drastic weather events. Education (particularly for females), clean drinking water, better nutrition and medical services, and a modernized infrastructure would alleviate some symptoms of underdevelopment. But the sustained growth and long-term well-being of the poorest countries requires political and institutional reform.

Corruption, confiscatory taxation, predatory bureaucracies, lawlessness, forbidding ownership of the fruits of one’s labor, civil wars, and our own trade barriers -- these are the real obstacles to Third World development.

A few essentials are required for progress: a rational, independent, codified legal system; the right to own private property; and at least relatively free markets. Transfers by wealthy countries usually buy Mercedes, monuments, and machine guns for despots, not better lives for the people.

If we want to protect the world’s least fortunate from the effects of climate change, our efforts and resources are better spent improving their economic opportunities than in chasing hot air.