Wild life heritage and biodiversity lost ?

[Guest guest]

sunday 21 Island 2003

www.island.lk

 

Features

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Biopiracy galore while trashing environment @ other people’s expense!

 

by Selvam Canagaratna

" The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment seemed to signal a

new departure for man. They did, in so far as the conquest, and subsequent

rape, of Nature are concerned; but they did not solve, on the contrary they

deepened, his predicament. "

— Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine

 

That also just about sums up what successive American governments, from the

Founding Fathers down to the present day, have brought upon themselves and

on the rest of the world (global village, remember?). Koestler’s observation

also helps us recall what prompted us weeks ago to embark on this voyage of

discovery into the story-behind-the-story of American altruism down the

years. As the official US records have revealed, this seeming altruism was,

is and always will be nothing but a shameful deceit to cloak a steely

determination to dominate the world economy by stealth, cunning and, if all

else fails, brute force. The ‘trigger’ for our journey back in time was the

first - and, so far, only? - public advocacy in such fulsome terms for Sri

Lanka’s acceptance of America’s Tropical Forest Conservation Act by an

official ‘spokesman’, for that’s what Mr. Rohan Pethiyagoda is, since he

signed off his press ‘pitch’ as Advisor to Sri Lanka’s Ministry of

Environment and Natural Resources. Yes, we are back to where we started:

America’s TFCA, a free and timely gift, as Mr. Pethiyagoda sees it - making

one want to scream that there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’ while also

reaching out for one’s not-so-secret WMD, Noam Chomsky, the only banned

weapon reportedly discovered to date in Iraq.

 

Why, you may wonder, does the US have to resort to such ill-disguised

largesse such as the TFCA? Having imposed on the world, since Bretton Woods

and World War II, an economic system driven by greed which demands

maximizing short-term profits without giving a damn for long-term

environmental catastrophe, the US has, for sometime now, begun running into

the reality, that’s why. And feeling the heat. The pretence that the world

is an infinite source and an infinite sink can no longer be maintained.

Hence a sustained public relations campaign has been carried on to create a

positive image, a.k.a. damage control, with the spin-doctors cleverly making

a virtue of necessity and flaunting American altruism as the outpouring of

an innate desire to nurture nature. To believe that, one has to also believe

that nature itself is an American invention.

 

Says Chomsky:

 

" The predictable effect of an increase in the world’s temperature through

the greenhouse effect will be to raise the sea level...it is not clear that

human civilization can continue. A lot of agricultural lands, for example,

are alluvial - they are near the seas. Industrial centers, like New York

City, could be inundated. The climate is going to change, so the

agricultural-producing areas of the United States could become

dust-bowls...they’re going to set into motion social conflict of a sort we

can’t even imagine. I mean, if it turns out...that Siberia is becoming the

next great agricultural producer, do you think that American planners are

going to allow the Russians to use it? We’ll conquer it, even if we have to

destroy the world in a nuclear war to do it. That’s the way they think, and

have always thought. "

 

Readers will recall how the TFCA was presented to Sri Lankans: ‘A unique

opportunity... an entirely one-way benefit in Sri Lanka’s favour... there is

no quid pro quo... ‘, while the government was urged to observe ‘the

greatest degree of transparency’ in the whole transaction. An assertion, by

way of response, that the bilateral agreement actually had a ‘seen’ and an

‘unseen’ part to it was challenged in unambiguous terms. The Advisor’s

vision appears to have lost some of its selectivity in that confrontation;

he hasn’t ‘engaged’ in the exchange since.

 

‘Pawn-shops’

 

An unexpected opportunity enabled a perusal of the transcript of the

hearing, on March 4, 1998, by the Committee on International Relations of

the US House of Representatives, to consider Legislation H.R. 2870, the

Tropical Forest Protection (sic) Act. Appearing before the Committee were

Congressmen and witnesses from the US Treasury, the Agency for International

Development (another one of those ‘pawn-shops’ where Third World nations

mortgage their all for guaranteed subsistence-level existence), and

representatives from NGOs such as Conservation International and the World

Wildlife Fund.

 

Goebbels got it right way back under Hitler: a lie, repeated ad nauseam,

will mutate imperceptibly into an accepted truth. Even the liar comes to

believe his lie. Reading through that transcript, one sees just how well the

‘lie’ of American altruism has taken root in America itself. Every single

speaker, starting with the chairman of that International Relations

Committee, kept mouthing variations of the lie-turned-truth.: that the

legislation before them that day was part of the US’s " proud tradition of

helping protect the world’s precious tropical forests. " This, readers will

recall, is what Paul Begala characterised, in the case of George W. Bush

(GWB), as ‘jaw-dropping mendacity’.

 

The claim was simply spurious, based on Roosevelt having ‘founded the first

public park system’. No mention, naturally, of the continuing environmental

destruction by America and American corporate entities both at home and

abroad between Roosevelt and now. The claim made in the august chamber of

the very nation which is the world’s largest polluter shows how effortlessly

the ruling class in America can learn to fool itself. One speaker, however,

showed that his altruism, like charity, began at home - and stayed there.

Said he: " I am concerned that the weight of the US Government in

international economics tends to be ‘Please open up your country to our

investors’ rather than ‘open up your country to our exports’. Exports

provide jobs for American working people and investment opportunities may

actually undermine those jobs. They may create products that can be

reimported into the United States. If this bill is trying to achieve some US

economic objective, I hope that it would be one of interest to our working

families rather than just to our investors. " To be sure, he was a minority

of one, but he certainly stood out from the motley crowd.

 

During the hearings the focus was, ostensibly, on protection for

protection’s sake. Then, almost like afterthoughts, came what constitute the

very rationale for the legislation they were discussing that day. Examples:

One speaker said " They [tropical forests] hold some of the keys to the

future of science... " . Another conceded at the end of his speech " And they,

of course, are the breeding grounds for new drugs... " . Yet another had made

the happy discovery that tropical forests had " ...the potential for medical

and ecological innovations to improve people’s lives....these forests are

seen as reservoirs of great promise for many new agricultural and medical

initiatives " . A fourth observed that " These forests...house many of the

species used as a basis for developing pharmaceutical products. "

 

Those, by the way, are important ‘afterthoughts’ when seen in the context of

the free-market approach, and are clear direction-indicators. Incidentally

in Sri Lanka, the objectives of those " afterthoughts " have, via the

committee which formulated the MOU for the ADB project (and chaired by the

then Secretary to the Ministry of Public Administration), also found their

way into our new Wildlife Policy 2000, and into the amendments proposed to

our Fauna and Flora Protection ordinance. The ADB-funded Protected Area

Management & Wildlife Conservation Project (being implemented in violation

of some of the major provisions of the existing FFPO), also incorporates

similar objectives - all in the name of conservation, of course. Just

coincidence? of course, what else?

 

It was also sheer coincidence that Mr. Rohan Pethiyagoda, then minus the

mantle of ‘Advisor’, was closely associated as head of a local NGO with the

expert think-tank (Task Force) that formulated the innocuous-sounding

amendments in the first two documents, and recommended for Government

approval the ADB project which contained the same objectives. And it’s the

same Mr. Pethiyagoda, in the garb of Advisor to the Ministry of Environment

and Natural Resources, who recently stepped out onto the public stage to

make his stirring call to the Sri Lankan masses on behalf of the TFCA.

Shades of Hamlet’s soliloquy. But drama aside, let’s consider the

implications. Coincidence or a sinister conspiracy? Mr. Pethiyagoda has made

his case, and so have we. Let readers be the judge.

 

Sheer commonsense should tell us that there is a clearly discernible pattern

that has emerged in what the West has done, is doing, and what it is

attempting to do in our part of the world. Bio- technology is what now

drives the West’s new and burgeoning industrial revolution; most of the

genetic material they need is in the possession of the Third World and is to

be found in our forests. So those who come as protectors are, in fact, pirates.

 

‘De facto world government’

 

Chomsky’s view of what’s happening in the contemporary period is a

disturbing one. " A new form of government is being pioneered, one designed

to serve the developing needs of this new international corporate ruling

class - it’s what has sometimes been called an emerging ‘de facto world

government’. That’s what all the new trade agreements are about...all

efforts to try to centralize power in a world economic system to ensure that

‘policy is insulated from politics’, in other words towards ensuring that

the general population of the world have no role in decision- making...the

World Bank calls it ‘technocratic insulation’, meaning a bunch of

technocrats who are essentially employees of the big transnational

corporations will work somewhere in ‘insulation’ from the public to design

all the policies, for if the public ever gets involved in the process they

may have bad ideas, like wanting the kind of economic growth that does

things for people instead of profits...the international business press has

described it pretty frankly as ‘The New Imperial Age’, and it’s certainly

the direction that things are going in. "

 

So where does the TFCA and Sri Lanka fit into all this? The transcript of

the March 4, 1998 hearing in the US unmistakably indicates the direction

things are moving in for us. It throws an altogether new light on Mr.

Pethiyagoda’s claim that the TFCA is " an entirely one-way benefit in Sri

Lanka’s favour... " or that " there is no quid pro quo...’. For one thing,

his sense of direction is certainly wanting, for the one-way benefit he

refers to is, actually, in the opposite direction. Worse still, that

‘imaginary’ and confidential Debt Reduction Agreement makes all sorts of

imaginary demands too: among other things, that the recipient-country have

" an open investment regime, must put in place major investment reforms in

conjunction with the loan of the appropriate international development bank

for the region in which the country is located, or else that the country is

implementing or is making significant progress toward an open investment

regime. "

 

Sri Lanka is no stranger to demands for ‘open investment regimes’ and

‘investment reforms’. They add up to the dreaded ‘structural adjustments’

that over the years have been used by the World Bank, IMF and ADB to try to

pry open our economy to foreign penetration and control. This time round,

the in-fighting has begun between the pharmaceutical conglomerates in Europe

and the US for the genetic resources available in abundance in Third World

forests. America, as GWB has made clear, will prevail. In the biotechnology

war too. The US is certainly taking no chances: look at the ‘firepower’ that

we in Sri Lanka have been persuaded to ‘upgrade’ and bring to our frontlines

- a new Wildlife Policy 2000 with more ‘holes’ in it than a sieve; a Fauna &

Flora Protection ordinance that, hopefully for the US, will soon be so

emasculated that it cannot even protect itself; and, of course, the

undercover network already in place in seven of our largest

biodiversity-rich national parks, code-named ADB Protected Area Management &

Wildlife Conservation Project. The addition of America’s latest

stealth-bomber, a.k.a TFCA., will make the foursome a truly winning

combination. With Mr. Rohan Pethiyagoda as Advisor to the Sri Lankans, it’ll

be a cake- walk for America.

 

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