Hi Ian; been away the last ten days and just getting through lots of backlog.
Yes, DO come to Rio+10! I'll be posting more and more as our eco-social movement comrades get their plans together... including a decision on whether to "fix it or nix it"...
***
ZNet Commentary (January 2001)
Welcome to Jo'burg (perhaps the world's most unsustainable city)
by Patrick Bond
If you had a choice, which host city would you choose for Rio+10, a.k.a. the 2002 `World Summit on Sustainable Development,' where 60,000 delegates will jawjaw about social and environmental problems, maybe in the process constructing more bits of a global state? Let's do a quick scan of the site picked by the UN last month: Johannesburg, South Africa.
The main Rio+10 conference will take place in what passes for Jo'burg's new business district, a hedonistic edge-city called Sandton. It's about fifteen miles north of the traditional city centre where, during the 1890s gold rush, the old Central Business District was first originally built--and then many times rebuilt, to ultimately welcome Africa's most intimidating concrete canyons.
But from an investor's standpoint, democracy wasn't good for that part of town, beginning in the late 1980s black South Africans were allowed into the CBD without their `passbooks.' Even mid-1970s office blocks--such as the Carlton Centre, Africa's tallest building at 50 stories--are now valued at 10% of their replacement cost, thanks to mass white-capitalist disinvestment and bank redlining.
Over the past decade, virtually all Jo'burg's white-run corporations fled the desegregating inner-city and instead built a huge, faux- Italian `public' square in the southern hemisphere's plushest suburb. Sandton Square was quickly surrounded by skyscrapers, banks (including a brand new Citibank tower), boutiques for the ubiquitous nouveau-riche, 5-star hotels, a garish convention centre, Africa's biggest stock exchange and other architectural detritus showcasing brazen economic power.
Given South Africa's crime hysteria, a fortress mentality prevails in Sandton. Jo'burg's cutting-edge high-tech surveillance systems, staffed by poverty-level black security-sector workers, compare closely to Los Angeles' Bonaventura Hotel and would give author Mike Davis even more raw material conjoining conspicuous consumption norms, insulate!-psychology, phallic symbolism, and a profoundly distorted political economy. And as for transplanting mediterranean themes to the African high- veld, you can imagine the culture clash.
(As an aside, Christmas week saw a vibrant power struggle between South African security guards and their sweatshop-style employers. While small black-run security firms agreed to union demands for a minimum monthly wage of US$200--hardly compensating for no perks and life- threatening work guarding the rich in the world's most unequal country--this was considered an excessive sum by the white- owned firms, many of which are run by ex- cops from apartheid times. That struggle continues, too.)
Just a couple of miles to the east lives Sandton's reserve army of labour, in an impoverished township called Alexandra, home to an estimated 300,000 people crammed into just over two square miles of mainly squalid housing. (A book by my friend Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics, published by Monthly Review five years ago, is still an excellent guide to Alexandra, because tragically little has changed since apartheid.) Last week, in the murky Jukskei River which cuts through the township, there was an outbreak of cholera, brought (say epidemiologists) by Zulu migrant-workers returning to the city from the holiday break. The national epidemic has already sickened 25,000 people, leaving 72 dead, with 500 more contracting the killer disease every day.
The reason is simple: nearly seven years after apartheid ended, most South Africans still rely upon untreated water, and there has been virtually no installation of even inexpensive rural pit-latrine sanitation since 1994. (As I mentioned in my December 5 ZNet Commentary, the disease's epicentre, last August, was deep in the rural KwaZulu- Natal ex-homeland, where piped water was cut off to destitute people who couldn't pay a $7 connection fee, having had free water supplied by the apartheid regime for 17 years prior.)
The apartheid-era migrant labour system is still dominant today, based on sustained patriarchy which has rural women carrying many of the labour-reproduction costs that a normal capitalist economy would internalise. Add to this the unserviced shack settlements which have popped up in many Jo'burg environs and you get a lethal mix, a public health bomb, detonated again and again by poverty, unemployment, evictions of poor people from formal townships, and cutoffs of municipal services like water and electricity.
Contributing to the madness, Jo'burg's lead bureaucrats announced last week, just as the cholera bug appeared, that they would redouble their `credit control' system against people not paying for services, by cutting off yet more poor residents. And then provincial bureaucrats announced, early this week, that they would begin mass evictions of tens of thousands of long-time Alexandra residents living in shacks along the Jukskei, in a two- week exercise reminiscent of apartheid forced removals (except not on race grounds now, we have instead full-blown class- apartheid). People will be moved dozens of miles away to other already-overcrowded shantytowns (many will resist).
In such a lethal zone of contradiction, political friction can be enlightening, as global and local pressures blend. For example, one sunny summer afternoon last month, I joined my friends Fernando Bejarano and Neil Tangri, who, with some Greenpeace activists, carried off a couple of spirited demonstrations at the Sandton Convention Centre. The glitzy Centre--the main staging point for Rio+10--was hosting an international conference dedicated to regulating `Persistent Organic Pollutants' (POPs) in early December. Fernando and Neil explained that once again, the official US delegation was the fly in the ointment. (True, the host South African government was also opposed to a conference resolution prohibiting all uses of toxics; Pretoria allows the dumping of PCP in malaria-infested areas, arguing unconvincingly that all other measures have failed.)
It looked like a repeat of the anti-landmines conference (which Clinton eschewed to the US' shame), or the previous month's debacle in The Hague, where stubborn Washington officials blocked `progress' on the Kyoto Protocol (aimed at slowing global warming). Even that sickly deal on CO2-emissions is based on a pollution-trading strategy that, environmental economist Peter Dorman warns, will raise the floor to the ceiling, because under emissions-trading, countries can sell rights to pollute (instead of themselves generating all the CO2 permissible, which may not be otherwise economical). So Clinton's team managed to reduce pressure on the US to cut its obscene contribution to global warming. And moreover, through the commodification of clean air--a strategy warmly endorsed by the World Bank and other neoliberals--Kyoto's maximum emissions become guaranteed minimums in any case. For the environment, Kyoto-Hague was a lose-lose proposition.
Here I finally come to my point. It is precisely because of such attempts at international `regulation' of environmental problems created by the market (e.g., global warming), *using tools of the market* (like emissions-trading), that I so firmly mistrust what passes these days for `global governance,' `global public goods' (as punted by James Wolfensohn, always in search of a fresh mandate), and especially the United Nations `global compact' with dozens of the world's largest and most irresponsible corporations. Their talkshops-- invariably in First World conference centres, sometimes like last month in shouting distance of Third World urban catastrophes-- rarely make a difference.
But to play devil's advocate, the POPs conference did ultimately deliver some nice- sounding language. Fernando, a former farmworker organiser with Cesar Chavez, is Mexico's leading anti-pesticide campaigner, while activist-intellectual Neil labours for the excellent Healthcare Without Harm international advocacy network out of Ralph Nader's Washington offices. As the conference closed, the two now-groggy activists stopped by after intense lobbying sessions to celebrate with a beer at my house on the way to the airport. They confirmed that at the last minute, in the wee hours of the morning, some left-leaning delegates pushed the US position to the wall on several particularly nasty chemicals.
Was this an exception, then? Perhaps, but typically such international conventions must still be ratified (and that's Jesse Helms' department). Most are merely nation-to- nation contracts, and if the US violates them, a country (like Haiti, for example) which receives a toxic gift (ash from Philadelphia a few years ago) must bear an enormous financial burden to contest the US (and its deep-pocket corporates) in the International Court of Justice.
Another local example unveils some political limits of global regulation. At merely a personal level, my own environmental consciousness-raising came from realising that Jo'burg water is now increasingly sourced from a massive dam-complex in Lesotho, several hundred kilometres south of here. In one of the world's most impressive cross-catchment projects, water shoots down from the Maluti Mountains into the river systems that supply Jo'burg, through a tunnel 42 kilometres long, built at a cost of $2.5 billion. But the dams that make this happen are fundamentally flawed, as an excellent international team of researchers and community activists have been revealing (the multifaceted case is too complex to simplify, but can be found at http://www.queensu.ca/msp under documents).
Thanks especially to help from the International Rivers Network, Center for International Environmental Law and Environmental Defense Fund, community activists in Alexandra have been fighting to stop the dams and instead make rich white Jo'burgers pay more to water their english gardens and fill their swimming pools, and force the municipality to repair apartheid-era leaking pipes through which half the township water drains out before reaching the people. They recently joined with Lesotho rural groups to demand a moratorium on further Lesotho dam- building, due to the project's many violations of best-practice recommendations made by yet another international assembly: the `World Commission on Dams,' sponsored by the World Bank and environmental group IUCN.
The activists have regularly complained not only to Lesotho officials and the South African government--especially the then- water minister, Kader Asmal, chair of the World Commission on Dams--but to the project's main organiser, the Bank itself. The Bank's in-house `Inspection Panel' is meant to provide oversight so its Board can cancel unsound projects. But because of politics (not sound technical reasoning) the Panel outright refused to consider--even fully investigate--the activists' case. (No point in offending or embarrassing Asmal, they seemed to reason; having once opposed the Lesotho dams as a case of apartheid sanctions-busting, Asmal in 1998 gave the go-ahead for expanding the controversial project.)
To name at least one name, it was Jim MacNeill, the Bank Inspection Panel's key staffer--and formerly secretary of the Brundtland Commission (which popularised the ghastly phrase `sustainable development')--who surmised that Asmal had introduced a sustainable water services policy to South Africa. Thus the Bank could ignore the Alexandra residents' plight, and specifically their case against the expensive, unnecessary, corrupt, ecologically- catastrophic and distributionally-unfair Lesotho dams. (I'd now like to invite Jim back to Jo'burg, to have a sip of Alexandra's Jukskei River water, just for a taste of sustainability.)
Again, the point is that the international struggle to stop large dams, whether in Sardar Sarovar, India or Lesotho-Alexandra, was shunted into an international conference setting, where progressive activists and researchers waged a struggle to add decent language to the final language. (Telling, however, was a minority rider to the report by Medha Patkar, the guru of the international anti-dams movement, and inspiration for defending the Narmada River.) Predictably, the SA government and World Bank ignored the activists' request for a moratorium on Lesotho's dams.
Back to the Sandton Convention Centre. Those of you readers who'll join us here protesting at the Rio+10 `World Summit on Sustainable Development' next year, will be happy to know that South Africa's best environmentalists, union organisers and social/community activists are already making preparations. Alexandra will host one of the most exciting `convergence centres' of progressive activists yet established.
For as Sandton puts out red carpets to Citibank and other toxic corporations so as to attract more tenants to its luxury buildings (corpos which might otherwise go to beautiful Cape Town, steamy Durban or the Jo'burg-Pretoria highway strip called Midrand), it strikes me yet again that the only way to stop such self-destructive competition between cities is to put sufficient political pressure on our nation-states to reject the international economic power structure, no matter how much it is camouflaged by the best-meaning UN conferencing.
That economic pressure comes, in its most direct manifestation, from the *real* embryonic world state--the IMF, World Bank and WTO--which is a veritable boot on a Third World leader's neck. (In other research, I've been tracing the cholera in KwaZulu-Natal and Alexandra directly to World Bank advisors, who claimed two years ago to have been `instrumental' in determining SA's water pricing system.) This spring, US university students and socially-responsible investment advocates will be helping some of the best South African activists attempt to defund--and some of us hope, close down--the World Bank (http://www.worldbankboycott.org)
In fairness, though, I will close by introducing next month's column, a review of the excellent new book by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith-- `Globalization from Below' (South End Press)--which takes a somewhat different point of view. Stay tuned, for more of this debate on whether to reform, or smash, the global state... a debate that may, depending upon strategy and the balance of forces, culminate at Rio+10 right here in Jo'burg.
Patrick Bond (pbond at wn.apc.org) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa work email: bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za work phone: (2711) 717-3917 work fax: (2711) 484-2729 cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548 * Municipal Services Project website -- http://www.queensu.ca/msp