The Divide
Page 34
p. 256 ‘And if the top 10 per cent . . .’ These estimates come from British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (www.kevinanderson.info).
Nine: The Necessary Madness of Imagination
p. 262 ‘Scientists tell us that even . . .’ These figures comes from the Global Footprint Network database.
p. 262 ‘Forty per cent of our planet’s . . .’ Ian Sample, ‘Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land’, Guardian, 31 August 2007.
p. 262 ‘Or look at fish: around . . .’ Gaia Vince, ‘How the world’s oceans could be running out of fish’, BBC Future, 21 September 2012, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-of-fish.
p. 262 ‘Haddock have fallen to 1 per cent . . .’ George Monbiot, ‘The great riches of our seas have been depleted and forgotten’, Guardian, 7 September 2012.
p. 262 ‘Scientists tell us that up . . .’ S. L. Pimm, G. J. Russell, J. L. Gittleman and T. M. Brooks, ‘The future of biodiversity’, Science 269, 1995, pp. 347–50.
p. 265 ‘Species biodiversity will have declined . . .’ OECD, ‘Biodiversity chapter of the OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The consequences of inaction’, http://www.oecd.org/env/indicators-modelling-outlooks/biodiversitychapteroftheoecdenvironmentaloutlookto2050theconsequencesofinaction.htm.
p. 265 ‘Stocks of all presently fished seafood . . .’ Charles Clover, ‘All seafood will run out in 2050, say scientists’, Telegraph, 3 November 2006.
p. 265 ‘Most major metal reserves will . . .’ ‘A forecast of when we’ll run out of each metal,’ Visual Capitalist, 4 September 2014, http://www.visualcapitalist.com/forecast-when-well-run-out-of-each-metal/.
p. 266 ‘Nor will it do much . . .’ ‘Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues’, Reuters, 5 December 2014.
p. 266 ‘Unfortunately, it no longer holds . . .’ Lew Daly et al., Does Growth Equal Progress? The Myth of GDP (New York: Demos, 2012).
p. 266 ‘Because past a certain point . . .’ As the economist Herman Daly has put it. See for example: ‘Sustainable development: definitions, principles, policies’, Mechanism of Economic Regulation 3, 2013, pp. 9–20.
p. 268 ‘If we bring it back . . .’ Thomas O. Wiedmann et al., ‘The material footprint of nations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(20), 2013, pp. 6271–5.
p. 268 ‘If we use this approach . . .’ Stefan Giljum et al., ‘Global patterns of material flows and their socio-economic and environmental implications: a MFA study on all countries world-wide from 1980 to 2009’, Resources 3(1), 2014, pp. 319–39.
p. 268 ‘And it is still going up . . .’ Friends of the Earth Europe, Overconsumption? Our Use of the World’s Natural Resources (Brussels: Friends of the Earth Europe, 2009), p. 26.
p. 269 ‘And of course the great . . .’ N. H. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
p. 269 ‘We would need to create . . .’ Kevin Anderson, ‘Talks in the city of light generate more heat’, Nature 528, 21 December 2015.
p. 270 ‘Deforestation is a major cause . . .’ US Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data’, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data, accessed 4 February 2017.
p. 270 ‘As the soils deplete . . .’ ‘Deforestation and its extreme effect on global warming,’ Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/.
p. 270 ‘Livestock farming alone contributes more . . .’ Carbon Countdown, Carbon Budget 2016 Update, Carbon Brief, www.carbonbrief.org.
p. 271 ‘Now, let’s accept that poor . . .’ Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
p. 271 ‘Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows . . .’ Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, ‘Beyond “dangerous” climate change: Emissions scenarios for a new world’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, 2011, pp. 20–44.
p. 272 ‘In this scenario, poor countries . . .’ Then they will have to reduce emissions aggressively from 2025, cutting by about 7 per cent each year until net zero in 2050, with assistance from rich countries.
p. 272 ‘And poor countries are going . . .’ The rate necessary for them to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, assuming maximum reductions from clean energy technologies and efficiency improvements.
p. 272 ‘We already have plenty of . . .’ Daniel W. O’Neill, ‘The proximity of nations to a socially sustainable steady-state economy’, Journal of Cleaner Production 108, 2015, pp. 1213–31.
p. 273 ‘After that, what makes us . . .’ Benjamin Radcliffe, ‘A happy state’, Aeon, 17 September 2015. See also Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level.
p. 273 ‘We should look at societies . . .’ P. Edward, ‘The Ethical Poverty Line: a moral quantification of absolute poverty’, Third World Quarterly 27(2), 2006, pp. 377–93.
p. 273 ‘A similar majority also believe . . .’ Reported in Jennifer Elks, ‘Havas: “Smarter” consumers will significantly alter economic models and the role of brands’, Sustainable Brands, 15 May 2014.
p. 277 ‘It made headlines in 2012 . . .’ Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, The Chicago Plan Revisited, IMF Working Paper WP/12/202 (New York: International Monetary Fund, 2012).
p. 278 ‘According to a recent report . . .’ US advertising expenditure data available at: http://purplemotes.net/2008/09/14/us-advertising-expenditure-data/.
p. 278 ‘This frenzy of advertising has . . .’ Betsy Taylor and Dave Tilford, ‘Why consumption matters’, in Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (eds), The Consumer Society Reader (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 467.
p. 279 ‘This may sound impossible, but . . .’ Neal Lawson, ‘Ban outdoor advertising’, Guardian, 20 April 2012.
p. 279 ‘Research by the New Economics Foundation . . .’ Anna Coote et al., 21 Hours: Why a Shorter Working Week Can Help Us All to Flourish in the 21st Century (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010).
p. 280 ‘Unlike microfinance, which has had . . .’ Maren Duvendack et al., What is the Evidence of the Impact of Microfinance on the Well-Being of Poor People? (London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 2011).
p. 281 ‘If growth is a substitute . . .’ Rob Dietz and Daniel W. O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources (New York: Routledge, 2013).
p. 282 ‘Forty per cent of agricultural soil . . .’ World Economic Forum, ‘What if the world’s soil runs out?’, Time, 14 December 2012.
p. 282 ‘In fact, industrial farming has . . .’ Oliver Milman, ‘Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say’, Guardian, 2 December 2015.
p. 282 ‘A recent study published by . . .’ Andreas Gattinger et al., ‘Enhanced top soil carbon stocks under organic farming’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(44), 2012, pp. 18226–31.
p. 282 ‘An article in Science suggests . . .’ R. Lal, ‘Soil carbon sequestration impacts on global climate change and food security’, Science 304, 2004, p. 5677.
p. 282 ‘And new research from the Rodale . . .’ Rodale Institute, Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change (Kutztown, PA: Rodale Institute, 2014).
p. 282 ‘And it comes with a very . . .’ R. Lal, ‘Soil carbon sequestration impacts’.
p. 284 ‘ “Come, then, comrades, the European . . .” ’ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth: Pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
Acknowledgements
Legend has it that Eduardo Galeano wrote Open Veins of Latin America in only three months, during the evenings after coming home from his day job as an editor. Isabelle Allende mentions this tantalising titbit in her foreword to the book, and when I first rea
d it I was inspired. Galeano’s rendition of Latin American history resonated with me; I was impressed by the data he marshalled as evidence and longed for his reporting to extend beyond Latin America’s shores and cover the rest of the South. That’s what I had in mind when I first sat down to write what eventually became The Divide. But I am not Galeano, neither in literary talent nor in pace. While I too wrote mostly on the side, tending by day to my research and teaching obligations at the London School of Economics, this book ended up taking much longer than three months. Still, I owe Galeano for giving me the foolish courage to try.
I also owe many others. To this day, when I sit down to re-read Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, I can’t help but feel that he said in 1950 everything that I have tried to say in this book, everything that has bubbled within me for so long, only more brilliantly. So too with figures like Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Walter Rodney, Julius Nyerere, and many others. And then there are those who said more with their lives than with their words – who risked everything in the struggle for a fairer world, and were killed for their efforts. From Patrice Lumumba to Salvadore Allende, all the way up to Berta Cáceres – I count them among my ancestors. They continue to guide and inspire me.
Each chapter that appears in this book draws on thinkers and writers much greater than myself: Raúl Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank, Gernot Köhler, Samir Amin, Sanjay Reddy, Frances Moore Lappé, Thomas Pogge, Peter Edward, David Woodward, Lant Pritchett, Mike Davis, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ellen Wood, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Susan George, William Easterly, Joseph Stiglitz, Ha-Joon Chang, Nicholas Shaxson, Fred Pearce, Bill McKibben, David Graeber, Herman Daly, Vandana Shiva, and countless others whose names appear in the text and the notes. I cannot list them all. I can only hope I have done justice to their work.
Many friends and colleagues have helped me along this journey. Martin Kirk – my occasional co-author – read an early draft of the manuscript and has offered helpful feedback at a number of junctures. Alnoor Ladha and /The Rules team provided a nourishing and challenging intellectual community wherein I was able to explore and develop many of the ideas that appear in these pages. Rebecca Reid helped me with research in the early stages of the project. Alice Pearson proved to be a helpful interlocutor throughout. Bibi van der Zee at the Guardian and my editors at Al Jazeera English helped me work out my thoughts in columns that ended up providing the basis for certain sections of the book. Ha-Joon Chang was gracious enough to advise me – and believe in me – when I started to think about publication. Zoe Ross has been supportive and enjoyable to work with – the best agent I could have asked for. My editor, Tom Avery, with his careful reading and keen sense for language and narrative flow, has made this book much stronger and more readable than I could have done on my own. And the team at W. W. Norton has been delightful to work with: Ashley Patrick, Jeff Shreve, and Francine Kass, who oversaw the art for the cover.
I researched and wrote this book while on an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, whose support I gratefully acknowledge. I take full responsibility for whatever faults it bears. And there are no doubt many. For one, I cannot help but feel I have left far too much out – important stories neglected for the sake of brevity: the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, for instance, during which ten million Indians were sacrificed for the sake of the British East India Company’s profits; the Sykes–Picot Agreement by which Europe carved up the Middle East; the French colonisation of Indochina; the Vietnam War, which saw the United States commit its full military might to destroy a peasant insurgency asking for land reform; and the seemingly endless foreign military interventions that have been conducted in the Middle East over the past two decades. All of this – and more – belongs to the story this book sets out to tell.
I must thank my parents for their constant support, which in this case came in the form of kindly asking after the book and then suffering my descriptions of action-packed days spent moving pixels around on a computer screen. Really, writing can be a lonely process. But I have been fortunate to have my partner, Guddi, beside me throughout. During long conversations in the kitchen around our little wooden table, mugs of tea in hand, she helped me shape ideas into arguments and stories, and slogged her way through drafts so shabby I am ashamed they ever existed. I am endlessly grateful for her patience, intellectual companionship and unflagging support – all of which she extended while getting on with a career much more important and demanding than my own. It’s safe to say that without her I would be a completely miserable bugger.
Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your devic’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Numbers in italics refer to graphs and tables.
abusive transfer pricing, 26, 289n
Action Aid, 28, 50
Adams, John, 137
advertising, 278–79
Africa, 175
AIDS crisis in, 188–90, 251
climate change and, 230, 231
colonialism in, 90–91
developmentalism in, 106, 114–15
effect of slave trade on, 72
foreign interventions in, 115–18
illicit outflows from, 213, 213
income growth in, 94
land grabs in, 222–23
structural adjustment in, 151
sub-Saharan, 59, 149, 150, 164–65, 165, 213, 213, 313n
African National Congress, 117
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), 182–83
agriculture, 282
government subsidies for, 12, 22, 182–83, 251–52, 314n
land grabs and, 223–24
patents and, 251, 258–59
see also farmers, farming
Ahidjo, Ahmadou, 117
AIDS, see HIV/AIDS
Alessandri, Jorge, 124, 307n
Algeria, 90, 151
Allende, Salvador, 123–24, 307n
Amin, Idi, 116
Anand, Sudhir, 52, 53
Anderson, Kevin, 271–72
Angola, 117
anthrax, US outbreak of, 189–90
Arab nationalism, 106
Arawaks, 67, 91
Árbenz, Jacobo, 111
Arévalo, Juan José, 111
Argentina, 105–6, 127, 145
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 24, 207, 317–18n
Asian Development Bank, 48
Asian Floor Wage, 258
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 246
Atahulallpa, Incan emperor, 68
Atlee, Clement, 103
Attenborough, David, 265
Aztecs, 64, 67–68
balance of payments, 26, 289n
Ban Ki-moon, 23
banks, 141–42, 277
Bayer, 189–90
BECCS (bio-energy carbon capture and storage), 269–70, 272
Belgian Congo, 90, 91, 92
Belgium, 115, 215
Benin, 182–83
Berlin Conference (1884), 90, 91
Bernays, Edward, 278
Better Life Index, 275
Bhutan, 284
biofuels, 219, 224, 257
blacks:
economic inequality of, 103
enslavement of, 70–72, 298–99n
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), 258
Bolívar, Simo´n, 94, 302–3n
Bolivia, 94, 113, 162, 285
Bongo, Omar, 117–18
Brazil, 21, 112–13, 127, 145, 230, 246
Bretton Woods Project, 258
Bretton Woods system, 103, 175–76, 200
Britain, 113, 130
African colonies of, 90–91
Chinese empire and, 86–88, 205
colonial legacy of, 10
foreign interventions of, 112–13, 115–16
free trade promoted by, 174, 175
labour unions in, 103, 130
land enclosure in, 74–76, 223
land grabs by, 222
life expectancy in, 64, 77
postcolonial nations’ policies as threat to, 21
privatisation in, 159
protectionism in, 154, 174
slavery reparations and, 71
Treaty of Versailles and, 100
widening income gap in, 131
see also United Kingdom
British empire, 175
India and, 19, 82–86, 88, 104
tax havens as legacy of, 215
British Virgin Islands, 215, 217
Brussels Definition of Value, 214
Budhoo, Davison, 156–57
Burkina Faso, 118, 169–70, 182–83, 218
Cabral, Amilcar, 116–17
Cáceres, Berta, 208
Camdessus, Michel, 156
Cameroon, 91, 117, 218
capital:
speculative movement of, 211
theoretical mobility of, 186–87
capital accumulation, 97–98, 178–79
capital controls, 106, 108, 112, 114, 145, 200, 211–13
capital flight, 25, 26, 289n
capital flows, 24–30, 27, 106, 145, 166–67, 200
illicit, 210–12, 214, 217, 254, 258
capitalism:
agrarian, 75–76
climate change and, 235–36
labour as necessity of, 74, 77
laissez-faire, see free-market capitalism
limits to, 158
in remaking of imperialism, 79–85
role of IMF and World Bank in perpetuation of, 158–60, 162–63
supposed inevitability of, 78–79
wages vs. goods contradiction in, 101
Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), 121, 126
carbon budget, 233, 271–72
carbon colonialism, 225, 256
carbon credits, carbon trading, 225–26, 255–56, 259
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, 228, 230, 233, 262, 271, 282
carbon sequestration, 282
Caribbean, 50, 66–67
Castillo Armas, Carlos, 111–12
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 197
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 111, 114, 124, 125, 307n