Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionfirms ensure practices which are directly contrary to those advertised to consumers.This is the flexibility that corporations seek to protect and it is enhanced by corporateadvocacy in other fora such as the World Trade Organisation. It is this advocacy thathas subjected national regulatory systems to international competition. And it is thisadvocacy which creates Byzantine market responses such as carbon trading: after a greatdeal of mathematics, and profit, the carbon credits traded still have no relationship toactual carbon emissions.Box 14: The illusion of clean production in EuropeIn his book Fair Future, Wolfgang Sachs writes:Only rarely is it still smelly and noisy in the late-industrial economy and windingtowers and blast furnaces have all but disappeared from the landscape. But evenwhere the Internet and design have taken over, a national economy cannotget by without raw materials. The acquisition and processing of raw materials,including the environmental costs associated with them, have only dropped outof sight in Europe … the greater part of the material flow never takes the formof a circulating object but remains somewhere along the product’s life cycle asdetritus or waste. …We may speak schematically of a multilayered distribution of ecologicalburdens around the globe. At the top of the ladder stand the late-industrialeconomies, in which visible environmental pollution is on the decline, whileimports, which pollute the countries of origin, are on the increase … Cleannessis here largely achieved, but largely through relocation of the ecological burden.… Halfway up the ladder are the newly industrializing economies, whichundertake heavy industrial production and therefore have to cope with classicalforms of the pollution of water, air and soil – and people. Self-poisoning is theprice they have to pay for a greater share of value creation, achieved in partby supplying the North with industrial goods. Right at the bottom stand theraw material economies of the poorest countries – or of poor regions withinnewly industrializing economies – which is where the great majority of peoplelive. They supply raw metals and especially agricultural raw materials to thenewly industrializing or affluent countries, and as a result they have to contendwith waste, deforestation, soil erosion and water shortage. This especially affectspeople living close to nature and groups of small farmers who directly dependon it for their livelihood. [Sachs 2007: 61, 66]- 86 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation