Dumping Electronic Wastes in Developing Countries
By Seeraj Mohamed, CPE Staff Economist
Are you still using a Pentium III? Can you access the web with your cell phone? Are you being left behind in the brave, new, wired world? The pressure to upgrade is intense but before you rush out and buy the latest electronic gadget there is a more serious question you need to ask. Do you know what happens to the obsolete electronic products you send for recycling or to the dump?
A report called Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, by a coalition of environmental organizations warns that enormous amounts of hazardous electronic wastes (E-wastes) are being exported to China, India and Pakistan. They say that methods used to process E-wastes in these countries are extremely harmful to people and the environment.
Members of the coalition found pollutant levels in villages in China where E-wastes are – processed, in Guangdong Province, just four hours drive from Hong Kong – to be hundreds of thousands of times higher than those allowed in developed countries. The report argues that the export of E-wastes to developing countries without adequate environmental regulations is not recycling but dumping. It is a way for the electronics industry of industrialized countries to pass on downstream costs to those living in developing countries.
Increasing rates of technological change has rendered electronic products virtually disposable due to rapid product obsolescence. For example, the lifespan of a computer has shrunk from four to five years to about two years. It is estimated that up to 50% of computers turned in for recycling in the U.S. are in good, working order. The electronics industry vigorously promotes this fad of increased consumption. It is the largest and fastest growing manufacturing industry in the world.
The environmental consequences of the rapid growth of the electronics industry and the consumer culture of increasing rates of mass consumption of electronic products are disastrous. E-waste is the fastest growing stream of waste in industrialized countries. However, neither the industry nor the consumers of electronics products bear the downstream costs of the enormous quantities of wastes produced.
E-wastes contain over one thousand different substances, many of which are highly toxic (e.g., lead, cadmium, beryllium, mercury, etc.). The burden of E-waste is borne by people who live in developing countries. Fifty to eighty percent of the E-waste collected for recycling in the U.S. is exported to developing countries, most of it to Asia. The amount of E-waste exported will probably increase as other states join Massachusetts and California in banning the landfilling of CRT monitors. It is likely that Environmental Protection Agency will further regulate the disposal of E-waste in the U.S., driving its export up even more.
The U.S. has not taken responsibility for their E-wastes because they have been able to dump it in poor countries. The electronics companies refuse to use less hazardous materials or to design for disassembly. The U.S. government refuses to hold electronics companies accountable for end-of-life management of their products. Furthermore, the U.S. is the only developed country that has not ratified the Basel Convention that bans the export of toxic wastes, instead it is actively working to bring to an end or weaken the convention.
It is time for us – as consumers and concerned citizens – to take action and show solidarity with people in environments being harmed by our consumption of electronic products. We should insist that the U.S. government set high environmental standards for design and materials used in electronic products. We should demand that dumping of E-wastes be stopped and that E-wastes are processed where they are consumed. Electronics companies must be told to take responsibility for end-of-life management of electronic products they produce.
Sources and Further Reading:
The coalition of environmental organizations that prepared the report, Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia are the Basel Action Network (BAN), the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), Toxic Links India (TLI), SCOPE (Pakistan) and Greenpeace China.
Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia is available on the BAN website: www.ban.org
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: www.svtc.org
Greenpeace China: www.greenpeace-china.org.hk
Toxics Link India: www.toxicslink.org
The Society for Conservation and Protection of the Environment (Pakistan) can be contacted at E-mail: scope@khi.compol.com
The Center for Popular Economics is a collective of political economists based in Amherst, Massachusetts. CPE works to demystify economics by providing workshops and educational materials to activists throughout the United States and around the world. If you would like to get more information about setting up a workshop for your organization, or would like to receive more materials about CPE, please write to us as programs@populareconomics.org.
Farming for Families and Food, Not Corporate Profits
By Corrina Steward
Foreign Policy In Focus
April 19, 2005
Two contradictory visions of globalization are sweeping around the world: one favors a top-down model of economic development via militaristic, corporate aggression. The other favors grassroots-led, democratic pluralism and seeks to produce diverse local development models suited to the needs of local communities.
Proof of these inconsistencies abounds. Paul Wolfowitz’s election to the presidency of the World Bank signifies the advancement of a militaristic approach to controlling global resources; at the same time, thousands around the world continue to protest against the war in Iraq and other examples of U.S. imperialism. Schemes to privatize water, agricultural crops, and other life-giving resources continue to be pushed through proposed trade agreements and state-corporate relationships; yet, global social movements are calling for community sovereignty with unprecedented forcefulness and international solidarity.
One of the biggest ironies is that global agricultural production is regulated by international trade rules when nearly 90% of food is produced for local consumption and never traded on the global market. José Bové, a leader of the international farmers' movement Via Campesina, points out that, “No one would have believed [before the World Trade Organization came into existence] that we would get to the point where the biggest social movement in the world is a farmers’ movement.”[1]
It is indeed surprising that agriculture--the most rudimentary form of industrial capitalism--is at the center of trade conflicts during this advanced stage of global industrialization. Yet, it also indicates a huge misunderstanding by free marketers of the local realities in the agricultural regions of the developing world, and even in U.S. and European farming communities.
Trade Rules for All, Benefit Few
The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) focuses on market access, export subsidies, and domestic support as a means for implementing a fair trading system. Reform in these areas focuses on export-oriented farming, which receives the majority of government support, and does not guarantee improved livelihoods for the farmers producing for non-export markets or on a small scale.
The WTO measures overlook several practices and trends, including the key issues of dumping of overproduced commodities and corporate control of the agricultural market. A recent Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy report pointed out that dumping is a human rights issue: “Coupled with the lack of social safety nets, [dumping] has caused serious human rights concerns since the implementation of the AoA, particularly for small-scale farmers who lose their livelihoods due to competition from subsidized, dumped imports.”[2] The human rights argument goes even further. Not only does dumping eliminate economic opportunities for rural communities, it denies local farmers the social and cultural values of their farming practices.
Corporate control of agricultural markets is intricately linked to government subsidies and also has human rights implications. In February, the Bush administration proposed reducing the annual ceiling on payments to U.S. farmers from $360,000 to $250,000. George Naylor, president of the National Family Farmer Coalition (NFFC), argues that this would pit U.S. cotton and rice producers against other U.S. commodity producers because the caps would only affect the former.[3]
Rather than allow a rift between U.S. commodity producers, Naylor insists, “Farmers have got to get together to say ‘this is ridiculous.’ We’re destroying our communities, our resources, all for the benefit of a few corporations. This policy is not good for us, for the United States. It’s only good for those few corporations.”
Corporate agribusinesses are the main profiteers of subsidies as they provide the means for keeping production costs low. Subsidies perpetuate a vicious cycle of poverty and resource degradation by encouraging overproduction of crops, soil erosion, increased pesticide use, below-cost prices, and deflated farmer income. Agribusiness benefits from subsidies through the lowering of crop prices, which minimizes their costs and increases their profits. “The same forces that are working against farmers in Africa and El Salvador are working against farmers in Iowa,” Naylor concludes. Due to the poverty and resource degradation cycle, producers are forced to take whatever price commodity buyers offer--limiting farmers’ capacity to define their livelihoods.
Democratizing Global Agriculture
As trade agreements seek to homogenize global agriculture policies and production, Via Campesina--a global network of farmers with as many as 200 million members--is calling for local policies and diversified production models. They are making farming communities’ needs central to agricultural policies and providing a much-needed reality check to U.S. and European Union trade negotiators.
Via Campesina has begun to carve out a new policy space in global agricultural politics for “food sovereignty.” The concept of food sovereignty is gaining political and social leverage as proposals like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) continue to threaten the ability of family farmers in both the North and the South to determine how food will be produced and who will make food production decisions. Via Campesina’s members believe in “the peoples’, Countries’, or State Unions’ RIGHT (sic) to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries.”[4]
Inserting food sovereignty into current agricultural trade and policy debates reframes them to approach national resources from a human rights approach rather than an economic one. The human right to essential resources is not a new concept. Several United Nations treaties already recognize the right to food, and traditional community rights over biodiversity are supported by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
With food sovereignty, the rights-based approach to international dialogue has resulted in new alliances between the global North and South, such as the alliance between U.S. farmer groups like the NFFC and peasant farming organizations in Central and South America . The food sovereignty fight is a multinational farmers’ struggle against corporate agribusiness and the national and international policies that support them.
Rather than focusing on limiting subsidies, NFFC explains that the poverty and resource degradation cycle could be controlled by:
1) Increasing global commodity prices through price supports;
2) Maintaining reserves of excess production to be used in times of need (e.g., drought) and as a means of maintaining steady commodity prices; and
3) Stopping production of a given commodity when there is an oversupply.
To implement these measures requires the right to prevent foreign imports from flooding national and local agricultural markets and reigning in corporate influence on the market. Cultivating local control begins with solidifying basic rights: rights to land and water and rights to political and social capital for marginalized communities.
Signs of Change
Despite the refusal of U.S. leadership to acknowledge that democratic, grassroots approaches to development are popularly supported world-wide, this model is gaining considerable ground. Every day, the Landless Peoples’ Movement in Brazil gains access to land necessary for community self-sufficiency and demonstrates that local control of vital resources is more environmentally and economically sustainable. Other movements-- from local food networks in the U.S. , to cross-border agro-ecological collaborations in Central America-- are formulating their own community-based development models.
Via Campesina is changing the language of agricultural trade from a language of corporatization to a language of farmers’ rights and local sovereignty. This resistance to corporate agriculture is the basis of hope for rural communities around the world.
Corrina Steward is a resource rights specialists at Grassroots International in Boston, MA. She wrote this commentary for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org). For more information on social movements working on food sovereignty and the Resource Rights for All initiative, go to: www.grassrootsonline.org.
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Endnotes
1. Bove’s comments are taken from a talk on “Food Sovereignty and Resource Rights” at Grassroots International in Boston, MA on March 7, 2005.
2. Smaller, C. 2005. Planting the Rights Seed: A Human Rights Perspective on Agricultural Trade and the WTO. Backgrounder No. 1, THREAD Series, IATP: Minneapolis , MN .
3. Naylor’s comments are taken from a talk on “Food Sovereignty and Resource Rights” at Grassroots International in Boston, MA on March 7, 2005.
4. Via Campesina. 2003. What is Food Sovereignty? http://www.viacampesina.org/IMG/_article_PDF/article_216.pdf.
Sustainable Agriculture
Introduction
Agriculture -- farming and grazing -- already uses 38 percent of the Earth's lands. Industrial agriculture is a leading polluter and a rapacious user of water. As population pressures increase everywhere, and the pace of conversion from forests to farmland accelerates, current practices will only continue to accelerate the cycle of poverty experienced by most farmers, especially in and around our planet's most sensitive and unique ecosystems.
But Rainforest Alliance Certified farms have reduced environmental footprints, are good neighbors to human and wild communities and are often integral parts of regional conservation initiatives.
Under the auspices of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), an international coalition of leading conservation groups, the Rainforest Alliance works with farmers to ensure compliance with the SAN standards for protecting wildlife, wild lands, workers’ rights and local communities. Farms that meet these rigorous standards are awarded the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal.
Rainforest Alliance Certified means:
• Less water pollution as all sources of contamination (pesticides and fertilizers, sediment, wastewaters, garbage, fuels and so on) are controlled.
• Less soil erosion as farms implement soil conservation practices such as planting on contours and maintaining ground cover.
• Reduced threats to the environment and human health as the most dangerous pesticides are prohibited, all agrochemical use is strictly regulated, farmers must use mechanical and biological pest controls where possible and strive to reduce both the toxicity and quantity of chemicals used.
• Wildlife habitat is protected as deforestation is stopped, the banks of rivers are protected with buffer zones, critical ecosystems such as wetlands are protected and forest patches on farms are preserved.
• Less waste as farm by-products such as banana stems, coffee pulp, orange peels and un-marketable foliage are composted and returned to the fields as natural fertilizer. Other wastes, such as plastics, glass and metals are recycled where possible.
• Less water used as water conservation measures are applied in washing and packing stations, housing areas and irrigation.
• More efficient farm management as the certification program helps farmers organize, plan, schedule improvements, implement better practices, identify problems and monitor progress.
• Improved conditions for farm workers -- who are getting fair wages, decent housing, clean drinking water, sanitary facilities and a safe and wholesome work area. Workers and their families have access to schools, health care, transportation and training.
• Improved profitability and competitiveness for farmers who have increased production, improved quality, reduced worker complaints and increased worker efficiency. The Rainforest Alliance Certified seal of approval gives the farmers more leverage at the time of sale, product differentiation, premium prices and improved access to credit.
• More collaboration between farmers and conservationists -- parks alone cannot save the world’s biodiversity; we have to ensure that wild flora and fauna find refuge outside of protected areas. Because farmers control the fate of so much land and so many critical habitats, their ideas and willing participation are essential to any local or regional conservation strategy.