Of course I was there: how could I not be when this was going down in the town where I was born? My mother and my childhood neighbors were kind enough to open their doors and guest rooms and couches to my colleagues. It was my four-month-old daughter’s first big protest, and a local Seattle artist made her a little T-shirt with drawing of a baby pacifier and the words “WTO SUCKS.”
I heard speakers from India, the Philippines, Brazil, and Nigeria give firsthand accounts of natural resources and communities sacrificed to the goal of increased and unfettered trade. I got to walk the downtown streets the day before the big protest day and felt the peaceful, hopeful energy of the crowd. The people there were smart and dedicated, spending their days learning about issues of sustainability and justice—by and large good people. There were so many of us that we felt change was truly within our reach.
On the day of the big planned march, rumors spread about police hostility toward the protesters, and I decided to stay home with my baby girl. We watched the coverage on my mother’s little television, and I got regular frontline updates from my colleagues via their cell phones. It was surreal to see tens of thousands of people from all over the world marching past the department store where I bought my prom shoes in high school and the monorail stop where I used to disembark with kids I babysat twenty years earlier.
Watching the events unfold on TV was disturbing. The newscasters didn’t offer substantive background about the WTO. They didn’t note how amazing it was that nearly one hundred thousand people were paying enough attention to the WTO to know what a problem it was and that they had left their jobs and homes to voice peaceful opposition. Instead they showed one clip over and over again all day: a couple of young troublemakers smashing storefront windows in downtown Seattle.117 I was fuming. If they wanted to show faces of the real WTO critics there, why not interview those speakers from other countries who came to tell their stories? Or Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, who was also there? Lori knows the provisions of the WTO so well that during her lectures, she sometimes invites audience members to yell out some topic, almost like a game show—Health care! Banking regulations! Small fisherfolk!—and she explains exactly how the WTO will affect, and undermine, those sectors. I don’t think she has ever been stumped.
And if the news wanted to show violence to keep up those ratings, there’s plenty of violence caused by the system that the WTO supports! They could have run clips of workers in garment factories being made to work so fast they lost fingers in the machines, or of miners in the Congo being beaten for inadequate results after an endless day’s work. Instead the media grossly misrepresented the day’s events, trivialized the serious concerns that the citizens voiced, and compounded our society’s ignorance of global issues.
Although the inappropriately named “Battle of Seattle” was the biggest WTO protest in the United States to date, such protests are much more common in other countries. In 2001 in India, for example, more than a million farmers protested against the WTO’s plan to force India to give equal preference to food grown by megacorporations in other countries and that grown by small-scale Indian farmers.118 The local farmers feared that the flood of imported food would lead to lower food prices, since corporations can leverage economies of scale. They argued that this would decimate the livelihood of millions of Indians—many of whom were already living on the brink of starvation—and lock the country into a relationship of dependence, when they were perfectly capable of growing food for themselves. Buying foodstuff from overseas would also drain resources to the megacorporations’ home countries, whereas buying from local farmers would keep more money in their community, contributing to a stronger, more resilient local economy.
Unfortunately the Indian farmers were not successful in protecting themselves from the flood of imports priced below market. Many of their worst fears were realized. But they keep fighting because their lives depend on it. In 2005, the Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements, a coalition of farmers from around the country, wrote a letter to the prime minister summarizing their demands in the face of the emergency: “The dumping of these agricultural commodities led to depression in the domestic farmgate prices, which led to a deep agrarian crisis and caused increased cases of farmers’ suicides... We believe that the very structure of WTO rules therefore distorts trade against small farmers, against food sovereignty and against trade justice. That is why we gave a call for the removal of agriculture from WTO... Agriculture in India is not an industry. It is the main source of livelihood for 70% of the population of the country. We therefore demand from the Indian government to quit from WTO. We also demand that agriculture should be out of WTO.”119 As I finalize this book in late 2009, farmers throughout India are continuing to fight with increasing desperation to protect their livelihoods and save their economy from being the latest casualty of the WTO.
Huge protests have also occurred against the WTO in Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. In 2003, more than 150,000 human rights, agriculture, environmental, and labor advocates descended on Cancún, Mexico, where the WTO was holding a major international meeting.120 The activists came from literally all over the world to insert their voices into the conversation. Many were desperate. The head of South Korea’s Federation of Farmers and Fishermen, Lee Kyung Hae, was so determined to bring attention to the WTO’s devastating impact on Korean farmers that he fatally stabbed himself in protest. A fellow South Korean farmers’ advocate, Song Nan Sou explained, “His death is not a personal accident but reflects the desperate fighting of 3.5 million Korean farmers.”121
In the United States, in a land of endless choice and immediate gratification, most of us can’t imagine what living on the edge really means. For us, a bad day is having the FedEx delivery delayed or the Internet connection disrupted. But in the rest of the world, millions of miners, farmers, and factory workers literally live on the very edge of survival. These are the people whom trade policies should be designed to benefit the most, yet they are the ones paying the heaviest price for WTO policies. And their voices go unheard by the WTO, which is infamous for being unwelcoming of public participation. It is no wonder these people are increasingly desperate.
In June 2009, the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act was reintroduced into the U.S. Congress with widespread support from both House Democrats and a diverse coalition of labor, consumer, environmental, family farm, and faith-based groups. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, the TRADE Act sets out what a good trade agreement must and must not include. Better yet, it requires reviews of the WTO and existing trade agreements, including NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), on economic, environmental, social, and human rights grounds and requires the president to submit plans to Congress to remedy the problems. It would also hold future trade agreements to the same higher standards.122 Passing this law would be a huge step forward for environmental and labor rights as well as for improving the United States’ relationships with our trading partners. To help turn this bill into law, please visit www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact.
My Revelation in Haiti
Can’t these institutions change? Why don’t they embrace higher environmental and labor standards, or pursue a development and trade model that promotes equity and environmental conservation?
Over the years, I have come to realize that it is not the institutions themselves that are the real problem (although they are certainly problematic: inefficient, undemocratic, and unaccountable). The real problem is the underlying set of values and assumptions and beliefs—the paradigm—on which these institutions are based. Most of the people running these hugely influential institutions actually believe that their prescriptions work and will ultimately improve life for everyone. At worst, they think it is the dose, rather than the prescription, that is the problem, explains Kevin Gallagher, professor of international relations at Tufts University: “They don’t think the reforms are wrong, but that they haven’t
been implemented wholeheartedly enough. If developing country economies adhere to our programs even more, they say, then things will get better.”123
This really sank in for me during my first trip to Haiti years ago. I had gone to Haiti because heavy-metal-laden ash from the city of Philadelphia’s municipal waste incinerator had been exported to Haiti, mislabeled as fertilizer, and dumped in a big open pile on the beach in Gonaïves. This infuriated me. How could a load of waste from the world’s richest country just be dumped on the poorest country in the hemisphere and left there? This incident seemed like a metaphor for how the United States had treated Haiti on so many levels for far too long. So I went to Haiti at the invitation of some Haitians who had contacted me seeking to collaborate to make Philadelphia take back its toxic ash. At that point I knew very little about how larger global systems operated—mostly what I knew about was trash.
The first people I met with were the women from the Disney sweatshop, whom I described in the previous chapter. After they had told me about conditions in the factory, some women shared their stories about moving from rural areas in the Haitian countryside to the city in search of these jobs. I asked them why they stayed in the city, living in slums that had little electricity and no running water or sanitation, and working in such obviously unhealthy environments instead of staying in the countryside with more space and cleaner air. The women said the countryside simply couldn’t sustain them anymore. Their families had given up farming since they couldn’t compete against the omnipresent “Miami rice,” as they called the white rice imported from the United States. “Miami rice” was grown on megafarms in the United States (not actually in Miami!) and delivered to Haiti for much less than the price of the more labor-intensive, more nutritious (and according to the Haitians, tastier) local rice strains. Farming, the women said, is dying in Haiti. They had no choice.
Next I visited farmers and former farmers. The one farmer I remember most clearly lowered his voice at one point and explained that Miami rice and the cancellation of the Haitian government’s subsidies for farmers was all part of a plan by the World Bank and its ally, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to drive Haitians off their land and into the city to sew clothes for rich Americans. Fewer farmers. More garment workers. The destruction of farming as a livelihood, he explained, was necessary to push people to the city, so people would be desperate enough to work all day in miserable sweatshops. When he spoke of it, he whispered and his eyes grew extra intense and I wondered if he was jumping to conclusions too fast, perhaps entertaining a conspiracy theory. I mean, really, how could agencies devoted to alleviating poverty want to have Haitians sewing princess nightgowns instead of growing food for their communities? As I said, this was a long time ago, and I was pretty naïve.
On the drive back to Port-au-Prince, I watched the Haitian countryside roll past, my head pressed against the glass of the van window. As harsh as eking out a living from that depleted countryside would be, it still seemed vastly preferable to the crowded urban slums.
The next day I went to USAID, a government organization that describes itself as “the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.”124 I didn’t know much about international development agencies back then, and I eagerly anticipated learning about strategies to restore the rural environment and get those farms back in working order again, to allow those who wanted to farm to be able to earn a sustainable, dignified living while producing food locally. It seemed crazy to me that a once-lush tropical island was abandoning farming and importing food. Local food means less packaging, less transportation, more local jobs, and fresher, healthier food. How could anyone not want that?
The USAID office was in downtown Port-au-Prince. When I went there, it was the first time I had felt air-conditioning, seen men in suits, or been surrounded by white people since arriving in Haiti. For the first time since I had been in the country, I worried my dress and sandals weren’t nice enough for the setting.
The USAID representative began explaining his agency’s vision for “developing” Haiti. To my utter amazement, he laid out the same plan as the whispering farmer had. But he wasn’t saying it while leaning closer, in hushed tones, with wild eyes. He sat up straight and tall and announced that USAID did not feel it was “efficient” for Haitians to produce food. Instead, he felt, they should participate in the global economy, leveraging their best resources, which apparently meant many thousands of people so near starvation that they would be willing to sew Sleeping Beauty pajamas from morning to night, endure physical and sexual threats, live in slums, only to be able to feed their kids half a meal a day.
He flat out proclaimed that local food sufficiency was not desirable or needed. He explained that a better concept is “food security,” which means that a population didn’t need to grow its own food but should instead import food, in this case from the United States. Since U.S. farmers (heavily subsidized, I’d like to point out) can grow rice more “efficiently” than can small Haitian farmers, USAID preferred that the rice from the United States be sent to Haiti and Haitians leave their farms to work in the garment factories—a job that, he felt, was less suited to the U.S. population.
I blurted out that “efficiency” was not the only criteria. A farmer’s relationship to the land, healthy and dignified work, a parent’s ability to spend time with his or her kids after school, a community staying intact generation after generation—all these things had value, and a real development plan would prioritize them. “Well,” he said, “if a Haitian really wants to farm, there is room for a handful of them to grow things like organic mangoes for the high-end export market.” I almost fell off my chair. I realized that the ideas that the Haitian farmer had shared were no conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires some attempt at secrecy. But here was USAID just laying out its grand plan for the people of Haiti—not as self-determinate people, but as a market for our surplus rice and a supplier of cheap seamstresses, with an occasional organic mango for sale at Dean & DeLuca. It wasn’t a secret plan; it was a plan they openly admitted and justified.
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 Wate
r 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 I know is tired and just longs to slow down. At a parent meeting at my daughter’s school recently, the meeting facilitator asked, “Who here is not in a rush most of the time?” Not one person raised their hand.
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