The biological consequences of the nuclear arms race were (and are) simply staggering. It seems hopelessly inadequate and crude to put a price tag on such far-reaching destruction. But according to one estimate, in the United States alone, it will take three-quarters of a century to achieve just a partial cleanup of defense-related contamination at a cost ranging anywhere from 100 billion to 1 trillion dollars.4 Globally, the fact that U.S. military installations remained, for the most part, exempt from environmental regulations has left many parts of the world profoundly contaminated and with little prospect of remediation. In a sense, we are all—Americans and non-Americans alike—downwinders.
BANKING ON NATURE
As extensive and serious as this toxic legacy is, it pales when compared with the ecological consequences that have flowed from bringing as much of the planet as possible into the orbit of the free market. The first step in making the world safe for the production and consumption of commodities occurred in 1944 in the little town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. World leaders gathered there to form the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), each capitalized with more than 7 billion dollars in funds. Led by the United States, which as the largest financial contributor has played the leading role in shaping these institutions, the banks were charged with helping to make the world safe for free trade.
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who presided over the Bretton Woods meeting, nicely summed up the assumptions behind this new global economic order. In his view, as spelled out at the conference, limitless economic expansion was the key to world peace and stability. He urged the Bretton Woods delegates to seize the opportunity for increasing “material progress on an earth infinitely blessed with natural riches.”5 If Morgenthau had any doubts about whether the planet itself could support billions of people all driving automobiles and embracing American consumerism, he evidently held them in check. In any case, his main concern was with preserving the short-term interests of American industry through world economic integration.
Morgenthau went on to lead the World Bank, which, along with the IMF, for more than 50 years has used its financial clout to shape global economic development. Lending money at various times to more than 100 nations, the bank has funded everything from massive dams for irrigation and hydroelectric power to sweeping road systems designed to open up vast stretches of forest to economic growth. The point was to encourage poor nations to organize their economies around the export of timber, minerals, livestock, and other valuable commodities to industrialized countries.
The model for many of these projects could be found right in the United States. In 1933, the federal government embarked on an immense plan for rescuing the Tennessee River valley, an expanse of flood- and erosion-prone land mired in poverty in the heart of Appalachia. A federal agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), oversaw an elaborate scheme, centered on flood control and generating inexpensive electricity, for breathing new life into this embattled region. The authority built more than 20 dams and later went on to construct massive coal-fired power plants designed to provide electricity to poor rural areas. Never before in American history had a federal agency been formed to manage the economic prospects of such a vast region, making it the perfect model for the new international order symbolized by the World Bank. Critics of the TVA have shown that, although the undertaking had some positive economic implications for the valley, its ecological and social costs were immense. The building of dams flooded many areas and forced thousands of people to relocate. All told, 15,000 people were displaced in Tennessee’s Norris River basin alone. Meanwhile, the strip mining of coal ransacked the landscape and led to serious pollution and erosion.6
Similar kinds of problems emerged across the globe as developing nations constructed massive public works projects along the same lines. Thailand is a case in point. Since 1957, 26 large-scale irrigation and hydroelectric projects have been built, the majority with support from the World Bank or other outside financial institutions. The bank-sponsored Bhumibol hydroelectric dam, built in the 1960s, was typical. It generated energy, but at the expense of the forced relocation of 3,000 people.7
BUILDING TVA’S DOUGLAS DAM
As the first major effort at federally sponsored regional development, the Tennessee Valley Authority built 21 dams and promoted modern agriculture based on fertilizer and pesticides. It has served as a model for the large-scale river basin development carried out in Brazil, India, and other developing countries. (Library of Congress)
Until recently, the bank also spent years helping the Thai government focus its economy around the export of timber, rubber, palm oil, and sugar cane. Loans subsidized the creation of large-scale plantations dedicated to such export-oriented agriculture. Breakneck economic development had at least two important consequences. First, as more land was cleared for agriculture, forests declined dramatically—from 53 percent to 28 percent of the nation’s total land area between 1961 and the late 1980s. Deforestation, in turn, played a role in the massive floods that tore through the nation in 1988. Second, the transformation of the countryside into large-scale agricultural enterprises left millions of people with no land at all. Evicted in the name of more efficient, U.S.-style economic development, landless farmers and their families flooded into cities. The vast majority of Bangkok’s prostitutes, one recent study has shown, came from such poor rural areas.8
The wrenching social and ecological consequences of World Bank–sponsored development stand in marked contrast to the small-scale irrigation agriculture that once dominated the countryside. Rice farmers had long been accustomed to banding together to build simple irrigation systems using mud, bamboo, and logs to channel the water. This method prevented sediment from building up, a problem caused by large-scale dams, which often completely seal off a river. These local committees also saw to it that upland forest areas were protected to ensure that the watershed would function in an ecologically sustainable way.9
Apart from funding major water projects, the World Bank, in league with the U.S. Agency for International Development, also pushed livestock programs. Between 1963 and 1985, the World Bank poured 1.5 billion dollars into Latin America for precisely this purpose, with much of the money channeled into raising beef for export. Feeding livestock necessitated a reorganization of the agricultural landscape. In Mexico, land that had once been planted with corn, rice, and beans for feeding people increasingly produced sorghum and other fodder crops. Such livestock programs not only compromised Mexico’s food security—eventually forcing the country to import corn from Canada and the United States—but also threatened the subsistence farmers’ very existence. Since it is cheaper to raise animals commercially on large farms than on small ones, the livestock industry became concentrated in fewer hands.10
By the 1980s, the untoward consequences of the U.S. development model had become glaringly apparent. Environmental groups in America cried out for reform. Congress passed legislation designed to rein in the World Bank and other multilateral banking institutions. It threatened to hold up their funding until they agreed to tread more lightly on the developing world. The banks were forced to hold meetings to consider their environmental performance and to include indigenous people in the planning of future projects.11
Reform is one thing, but an escape from the economic calculus that leads such banking institutions to treat developing nations as little more than tools of the global capitalist system is something yet again. In 1991 the World Bank’s chief economist, Lawrence Summers, observed (in an internal memo leaked to the press) that Africa was “vastly underpolluted,” pointing out as well that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable.” The World Bank claimed the memo was meant to “provoke debate” within the bank. “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane,” Brazil’s secretary of the environment later told Summers. In reality, most economists measure human life in terms of its ability to produce present and
future wages. Dumping toxic waste where life is cheap, whether it be the barrios of Los Angeles or some poor Third World nation, remains, in the minds of many economists at least, a justifiable and economically efficient way of handling the disposal problem. No reform that Congress is likely to impose on the World Bank, or any other institution involved in global development, is likely to change the economic philosophy at the heart of the free enterprise system.12
THE GREEN REVOLUTION
The actions of the World Bank, the IMF, and other such U.S.-dominated global financial institutions went hand in hand with a more formal attempt to transform Third World agriculture. Beginning in the 1940s and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, the “Green Revolution” swept across the developing world, transforming much of it into a mirror image of U.S. industrialized farming. The transfer of high-yielding strains of various crops—especially wheat, rice, and maize—developed by U.S. plant geneticists to poor nations was at the center of this initiative. Postwar American policymakers concerned with issues of overpopulation, hunger, and the potential for political unrest that might ensue, especially in nations in close proximity to Communist states, saw in the Green Revolution a way out of these dilemmas. Solving the world’s food problems was of course a worthy cause. And all the better if it could contribute to national security by making the planet safe for democracy.13
The United States itself had effectively gone through its own Green Revolution beginning in the 1930s. Before this point, farmers growing corn, for example, depended on the natural process of pollination to produce seeds, which in this case were the actual corn kernels themselves. When the wind blew, pollen from different varieties of corn plants became airborne and fertilized the same or other corn plants. A diverse gene pool was the result. Then, in the early part of the twentieth century, scientists took the seed from two hybrid varieties of corn—each bringing with it different genetic stock—to produce a “double-cross” hybrid. The move led to a dramatic increase in corn yields. In the 1930s, companies sold the new and improved seeds to farmers throughout the Midwest’s Corn Belt. World War II, which siphoned manpower from American farms, made high crop yields increasingly important and further aided the sale of hybrid seeds. By the 1960s, the new generation of corn almost completely dominated America’s fields.14
These varieties were a boon yield-wise, but they also narrowed the gene pool of corn (as company-bred seed eclipsed pollination) and led to the further intrusion of corporate enterprise into agriculture. The nonhybrid corn seeds could be replanted from one year to the next without diminishing yields. This was not true, however, of the hybrid varieties. Replanting culminated in a reduced harvest. Each year, farmers had to buy more from seed companies, who coveted the parent stock and breeding sequence for the double-cross, hybrid corn. Instead of producing their own corn seed or trading for it with a neighbor, farmers now found themselves more dependent than ever on outside companies for agricultural germ plasm. Seeds, like many other aspects of the natural world—land, water, and animals—had made the leap from a public good to a sheer commodity.
With the advent of commercially available hybrid corn seeds, yields, which had been declining, increased dramatically. One of the first people to realize the commercial value of the new seeds was Henry Wallace, a prominent Iowa farmer who went on to become secretary of agriculture in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. In the 1940s, Wallace convinced the Rockefeller Foundation—a private organization that believed increased food production would ward off the Communist threat and contribute to global stability—to set up an agricultural research center in Mexico. The Mexican government, faced with a floundering economy and increasing population growth, had earlier asked the United States for help with its farming sector. The Rockefeller Foundation recruited plant scientist Norman Borlaug to work on developing a new, more productive breed of wheat to boost Mexican harvests. Eventually, Borlaug, who in 1970 won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, succeeded in breeding a set of high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat varieties. The new strains of wheat were bred to require heavy doses of nitrogen and to focus photosynthetic activity into the production of grain, as opposed to the stem of the plant. Shorter stalks also kept the wheat heads—now much larger—from toppling over.15
From its origins in Mexico, the Green Revolution—with the aid of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, the United Nations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—spread around the globe. In the context of the Cold War there was much concern in U.S. government circles that India would, like China before it, turn to Communism. But the new technical advances in plant breeding were not simply foisted on an unwilling nation; like their Mexican counterparts, the Indian government, faced with difficulties providing enough food for its growing population, welcomed the initiative. By the 1960s, Borlaug’s new wheat seeds had made their way to the subcontinent, with the country becoming self-sufficient in grain by the end of the decade. In the 1970s, the Philippines, another Green Revolution convert, had achieved self-sufficiency. Across the globe, in countries such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Egypt, and others, new high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice were boosting food prospects. In the space of little more than a generation, the new hybridized varieties came to dominate global agriculture by the early 1990s, making up three-quarters of all the wheat and rice grown in Third World nations. A major event in the history of biological exchange had taken place.16
The Green Revolution unquestionably succeeded in increasing the world’s supply of food. Worldwide, harvests tripled between 1950 and 1990. Malthusian concerns that population would outstrip the available food supply were proved wrong. But in the last decade, the new breeds have had a diminished effect on world grain harvests. The Green Revolution has also had some troubling side effects.17
In effect, the Green Revolution took American industrialized agriculture and exported it abroad. Just as had happened to U.S. farmers beginning in the 1930s, those who worked the soil in foreign lands found that they had lost control over the agricultural gene pool, as seeds went from being a free good to a commodity that had to be purchased. Farmers who had once saved seeds and exchanged them freely among themselves now had to figure out how to pay for the expensive new varieties.18
The new generation of higher yielding seeds also undermined the nutrient cycle. In India, for instance, rice was once raised for food but also to produce fodder, which, when fed to livestock, resulted in valuable manure for maintaining soil fertility. The new Green Revolution varieties—which had less stalk and more grain—broke up this endless cycle of nutrient transmission and substituted a more costly and ecologically destructive one-way production system. Basic agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides now had to be purchased to produce a single, commercially viable product: grain. Nitrogen-based fertilizer was especially crucial to the success of the new dwarf species. “If I were a member of your parliament,” Nobel laureate Borlaug told Indian politicians in 1967, “I would leap from my seat every fifteen minutes and yell at the top of my voice, ‘Fertilizers! … Give the farmers more fertilizers!’” By 1980, India was importing 600 percent more fertilizer than in the late 1960s. As fertilizer use boomed, lakes and rivers suffered increased pollution, as some of the chemicals missed their mark.19
Ultimately, the Green Revolution dramatically reduced genetic diversity. Countless ecologically adapted, locally grown species of wheat and rice were replaced with just a handful of varieties. By the mid-1980s, the thousands of different kinds of rice once grown in the Philippines gave way to just two Green Revolution species.20
The Green Revolution, in conjunction with the increased mechanization of farming, also encouraged monoculture. This trend led, as single-crop farming almost always does, to increased problems with pests. Beginning in the late 1960s, a bacterial blight followed by the tungro virus struck the new dwarf rice in Southeast Asia. Infestation led, predictably, to greater reliance on pesticides. In the Philippines, pesticide imports quadr
upled between 1972 and 1978 alone. Ultimately, the Green Revolution forced Third World nations down the path of chemical dependency, producing the same energy-intensive agriculture that had come to reign in modern America.21
Increased grain yields, many have argued, were worth the ecological costs. By the 1970s, for example, peasants in Malaysia, who for centuries had lived under the specter of famine, had enough rice to last the entire year. In the Philippines, grain harvests improved so much that by the late 1970s the country was actually exporting rice. The benefits of the increased yields, however, seem to have bypassed the Philippine people, who remained one of the most poorly fed groups in all of Asia. Similarly, in India, wheat yields in the Punjab boomed in the 1960s while, at the same time, the number of people living in poverty actually increased. Even in Malaysia, a supposed success story, the results of the revolution, upon further investigation, proved far more mixed. The greatest profits from the revolution went to those with the means to afford large amounts of land and capital, contributing to increased social inequality.22
DEAD WOOD
Private enterprise also took its toll on the Third World, especially in tropical environments where rainforest capitulated to the rising demands of American consumer culture. In the 70 years following U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War—a struggle that gave the nation its first overseas empire—American business poured into Latin America, various Pacific islands, and, to a lesser extent, Africa.
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 36
