Socialist Resistance

Norman Traub

Africa has the lowest per capita fossil energy use of any major world region. Yet the continent is suffering considerably as a result of climate change caused by global warming and is the least equipped to deal with the crisis because of the poverty of its people.

The ice cap is receding on Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. Desertification is spreading in the north western Sahel region. Droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Numerous plant and animal species are in decline. Tropical diseases like malaria are spreading. The ecological problems that the capitalist countries of Africa face are aggravated by the deliberate policy of pollution export practised by the advanced capitalist countries.

Africa’s history, from its devastation by the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries, its colonisation and subjection to imperialism, is intimately tied up with the development of capitalism. Political economist Patrick Bond at the beginning of his book Looting Africa (1) summarises the reasons for poverty in Africa. “Africa is poor, ultimately, because its economy and society have been ravaged by international capital as well as by local elites who are often propped up by foreign powers. The public and private sectors have worked together to drain the continent of resources which otherwise-if harnessed and shared fairly- should meet the needs of the peoples of Africa.”

The impoverishment of Africa is compounded by the damage to the ecology of the continent caused by climate change as well as the pollution exported there by the rich capitalist countries.

In November 2004 a coalition of 18 aid agencies and green organisations including Oxfam and Greenpeace reported that global warming was now the most serious problem facing the poor of the earth. Unless it was checked, the coalition argued, it threatened any progress they might make. The report called upon the rich capitalist countries, which have produced, and continue to produce, most of the greenhouse gas emissions, to cut them drastically.

Climate change has been called an act of aggression by the rich against the poor and this is borne out repeatedly as disastrous floods and droughts kill thousands of people in the capitalist countries of Sub Saharan Africa and Asia.

The coalition’s report went on to point out that Africa is uniquely vulnerable to climate shifts with 70% of its people being immediately dependent on rain-fed, small scale agriculture. It said that 14 African countries were already subject to water stress and that they would be joined by a further 11 nations in the next 25 years.

Rainfall is predicted to decline in the Horn of Africa and some parts of the south of the continent by as much as 10% by 2050, while the land may warm by as much as 1.6C. The crop harvests for hundreds of millions of people are likely to be affected. The sea level around the coast of Africa is projected to rise by 25cm by 2050 and both the west and east coast are likely to suffer from erosion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that Africa will suffer more than the rest of the world from global warming.

In the face of the foreseeable affects of climate change and with 850 million people living on less than $1 a day, how can Africa raise living standards and grow enough food to feed its hungry people? Millions of poor farmers and peasants in Africa are barely able to subsist on the land or are made landless and swell the huge slums and shanty towns in the big cities.

The problems that they face have to be seen within an international framework In the 1970s and 1980s African countries were caught in the debt trap. Debt has become a new permanent mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the peripheral capitalist countries to the capitalist classes in the metropolitan countries and the local elites of the South.

During the 1980s and 1990s Africa repaid US$255 billion of foreign credit, a factor of four times the original 1980 debt. Yet between 1980 and 2002 Sub Saharan Africa’s total foreign debt rose from $61 billion to $206 billion.

There is a world wide demand for cancellation of the debts of peripheral capitalist countries, which in any case are unrepayable. Tied to the loans offered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the African countries were onerous conditions embodied in structural adjustment programmes. These obliged governments to liberalise trade, reduce tariffs and among other measures, dismantle domestic support for farmers.

To ensure repayment of the debt, the international financial institutions encouraged Africa to export its natural resources, which accounted for 80% of African exports in 2000. A dozen African countries were dependent on a single commodity for exports. The long term decline in prices for primary products such as coffee, tea and cotton, upon which the export of many African countries depend, is extremely damaging to their economies.

The World Bank in a report in 2005, considering the depletion of natural resources - petroleum, other subsoil mineral assets, timber, cropland and pastureland - associated with trade, had to admit that Africa is much poorer than it would have been if it had not concentrated on export of primary products.

While the IMF and World Bank demand that state support for farmers in Africa is removed, no such bans on aid apply to the farmers in the advanced capitalist countries, who receive massive agricultural subsidies. The US, European and Japanese agricultural industry are thus able to dump grains and foodstuffs in African markets.

It is not only the depletion of natural resources but pollution damage sustained in the extraction of primary products that is contributing to the impoverishment of Africa. A decade ago when Larry Summers (later the Clinton Administration’s treasury secretary) was the World Bank’s chief economist he publicly advocated the export of pollution to Africa. He said ‘I’ve always thought that under populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low…I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’.

As countless examples of the dumping of toxic waste in African countries show, this pollution policy is still being pursued today. In 2007 a Dutch company with revenues of US$ 28 billion dumped 500 tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, West Africa because it did not want to pay the $250,000 disposal fee in the Netherlands. At least 10 people died from the fumes, 69 were hospitalised and more than 40,000 people needed medical attention. Earlier this year a container with toxic cargo was dumped at the roadside near Mombassa, Kenya after it had been offloaded at the port. Two Mombassa residents suffered serious injuries and several others were treated for pulmonary ailments.

In their unending quest for fossil fuels for energy and for raw materials, the multinational companies will go to any lengths, including seriously damaging the ecology. One of the most notorious examples is the damage to the Niger Delta in Nigeria where the multinational oil companies, in particular Shell, have their operations.

In a report to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the people of the Niger Delta said “Apart from air pollution from the oil industry’s emissions… we have widespread water, soil and land pollution.” The pollution of the land and water has since made farming and fishing in large areas of the Niger Delta impossible. With no means of livelihood whole communities have become destitute.

If multinational capital in Africa is to be replaced by policies beneficial to the continent’s communities and ecology, poor farmers and urban workers will have to unite against imperialist exploitation and ally themselves with radical forces internationally which share their objectives.

Some of these forces, in the burgeoning movement of ecosocialism, have come up with the idea of an ecosocialist manifesto, a work still in progress (2). The manifesto states: ‘the generalisation of ecological production under socialist conditions can provide the ground for the overcoming of the present crises. A society of freely associated producers does not stop at its own democratisation. It must, rather, insist on the freeing of all beings as its ground and goal. It overcomes thereby the imperialist impulse both subjectively and objectively. In realising such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms of domination, including, especially those of gender and race…Ecosocialism will be international, and universal, or it will be nothing. The crises of our time can and must be seen as revolutionary opportunities, which it is our obligation to affirm and bring into existence’.

(1) Looting Africa: the economics of exploitation by Patrick Bond. Published by Zed Books 2006.

(2) Ecosocialism or Barbarism p119. Published by Socialist Resistance Books 2007.

(Separate box or editorial?)

Capitalism cannot solve the ecological crisis

That climate change is due to human activity is no longer seriously disputed. The view of the world scientists as embodied in the 4^th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) backed this conclusion.

The source of the ecological breakdown we are facing is capitalism and in particular its deadlier neoliberal phase occurring in the last thirty years. Humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the industrial revolution and the rate of increase is becoming more rapid. Capitalism, based as it is on providing profits for the owners of capital and not for human need, devotes large parts of the production process to turning out socially useless and often harmful products which pollute the atmosphere and destabilise ecosystems.

Capitalism cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so would set limits to its insatiable drive for profits. It has become increasingly recognised worldwide that the only way to stop ecological destruction is the socialist transformation of society in an ecological framework. This is advocated by ecosocialist who recognise the need for ‘limits on growth’ of production imposed for sustaining the environment. This goes hand in hand with the transformation of needs for use value rather than exchange value.