• The Sinister “New Democracy”
• A Brief History of Globalisation
• “A Glimmer of Hope in Seed Patenting”
• “Scarcely Believable Economics”
• Say No To The WTO!

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN ORKNEY is not only concerned about the Orkney environment, but also represents Orkney’s concerns about the environment in general, right across the planet we inhabit.

A survey of The Ecologist magazine (July 1999 issue) throws up a number of interesting and surprising stories. WE SHOULD all by now have become thoroughly accustomed to the usage by the big establishments - whether governments or multinational businesses - of names and descriptions that, while having an innocuous ring to them, conceal something sinister. This was a feature particularly developed in the Thatcher era of British politics. Then we had the “Community Charge” (despite the Iron Lady Herself denying the very existence of ‘community’ - “there are only individuals and families” she claimed to believe), and we had “Care in the Community” (that word again!). We now have “New Labour”! We can add another ‘new’ item to this list, perhaps the most sinister of all, namely “NEW DEMOCRACY”!

You might think that we could do with a new democracy, since we have had precious little real democracy to date in Great Britain, with its relatively rigged first-past-the-post electoral system; with Prime Ministerial patronage as the principal instrument of the smooth continuance of Royal Government; with the UK being one of only two states to have no written constitution (the other being Saudi Arabia, another stronghold of Royal Government), with no proper Freedom of Information Act and so on.

The Ecologist carries an article - The “Rise of the New Democracy”, by John Pilger, which should be essential reading for environmentalists everywhere, as well as for those who will become even more severely disadvantaged that they already are at the present if the globalization policies of the “New Democracy” are carried any further. THE NIGHTMARE scenario of the “New Democracy” will come into existence when governments (not perhaps noted as being everyone’s friends, but nevertheless all we have to protect us in the final analysis) sign the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiations for which have been conducted virtually in secret until someone leaked onto the Internet what was afoot.

What MAI really means, it seems, is that once signed it will deprive governments of their sovereignty, which will in effect be handed over to the world’s multinational corporations. They will then be in legality what they are already in practice - namely the World Government!

In their quest for complete world freedom, the multinationals seek to remove every vestige of hindrance to free trade, and in pursuit of this, the MAI would give multinationals the right to sue, in their own ‘court’, any government who tried to protect its citizens by setting up any barriers - to free movement of capital, to free trading of any commodity or to investment or withdrawal of investment by anyone - in any country which signs the agreement.

Indeed, examples have already occurred, since agreements of the MAI type have existed since 1995 - the date which The Ecologist regards as the effective beginning of World Government. In the limited North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), when the Canadian Government tried to prevent the sale in Canada of a petrol additive having harmful, carcinogenic properties, it was successfully sued by the multinational company concerned, and had not only to pay a huge fine (of whose money, incidentally? The Canadian taxpayers’ of course), but also it had then to permit the sale of this noxious additive.

Pilger describes the “temporarily stalled Multinational Agreement on Investment negotiation” as “the most important imperial advance for half a century”. Effectively, a successfully concluded MAI will mean the transferring of a country’s national development policy away from its own government into the hands of multinational corporations.

So, for example, Colombia would have to repeal laws against the disposal of toxic and radioactive waste; Brunei, Pakistan and Brazil would no longer be allowed to prevent foreign ownership of agricultural land, and Venezuela would have to surrender its national film, TV and publishing industries to foreign interests. IT WAS the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that set up the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank to be instruments of American global policy. Other regional ‘development banks’ followed, for Asia and for Africa.

By the late 1970s, the technique had evolved of banks pressuring poor countries to borrow petro-dollars, which had accumulated as a result of the disastrous 1974 quadrupling of oil prices. To qualify for these loans, a country had to submit to the process of a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).

Oddly enough, in view of the recent headlines, it was General Pinochet whose country of Chile was the first to have its economy ‘structurally adjusted’. Oddly too, in view of Chicago’s disreputable history of gangsterism in the days of Prohibition, it was a group of economists trained at Chicago University (under the laissez-faire cult economist, Milton Friedman) who carried out Chile’s restructuring! And what were the results? Prior to Pinochet, Chile had a reasonable living standard for most of its people. After restructuring by the IMF economists from Chicago, Chile’s national debt was higher, industry was dismantled, the currency was devalues and the majority of Chileans were plunged into poverty: 40% were (are?) so poor and their food intake so low that they are blighted by hunger and malnutrition.

In the 1980s, President Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, James Baker, devised a plan whereby indebted countries were offered World Bank and IMF ‘servicing loans’ in return for ‘structural adjustment’ of their economies. This meant that those countries’ economies would be planned and directed, monitored and controlled not by their own governments but in Washington D.C. in the USA; industry would be deregulated and sold off and subsistence agriculture would be converted to the production of foreign exchange - earning ‘cash crops’.

THE RECENT rise to power in the UK of “New Labour” is a reflection of the same sort of process, since the “New Democracy” has, as an important feature, the confusion of the electorate by offering a choice (nice Thatcherian word) of leaders who actually share the same economic policies and differ only in their style of leadership. Why otherwise was Margaret Thatcher among the first to be invited by Tony Blair to No. 10 Downing Street for ‘consultations’? The sad legacy of the “New Democracy” is that Britain has now become, like the USA, a single ideology state - as Pilger puts it - with two principal, almost identical factions, so that the results of any election has a minimal effect on the economy and on social policy.

It was Thatcherism that created in Britain (described by Pilger as “the laboratory to the First World that Chile was to the Third”) a 60% increase among Britons of ‘income poverty’! A UN Human Development Report (1997) claims that in no other country than Britain has poverty ‘increased as substantially’ since the early 1980s. Britain is now a ‘two-thirds’ society as a result of Thatcherism and the “New Democracy”: the top third privileged, the middle third insecure, the bottom third poor.

And in this scenario, we can be sure that the Multinational’s disdain for the welfare and aspirations of ordinary people is equalled, if not exceeded, by their disregard for the Environment. THE ECOLOGIST (July 1999) carries an article by Andrew Kimbrell entitled “Seeds of Conflict”.

A biotechnology firm, Pioneer Hi-bred International, started a lawsuit against a small farm-supply dealership, Farm Advantage, and its president, Marvin Redenius, in 1998 because he re-sold corn seed allegedly ‘belonging’, by virtue of a patent, to them. Redenius and his lawyer decided to embark of a David and Goliath battle by fighting Pioneer (since then merged with DuPont).

Nothing so unusual in that, you may think, except that the affair is sending shock-waves through global agribusiness, basically because of the very simplicity of Farm Advantage’s defence - that plant patents are invalid and illegal because they contravene a US law, passed in 1970 and still in effect, which expressly prohibits the patenting of any plants grown from seed. If this law has been overlooked for the thirteen years since 1985 when plant patents started, and Redenius’s defence succeeds, not only will Pioneer or any other company be unable to seek plant patents, but the thousands of patents already granted (including virtually all genetically engineered varieties) would be invalid.

We will be watching this space with bated breath, not to say great interest! THE ECOLOGIST (July 1999) highlights an occurrence which I am sure we, like the judge of the court case, must find “scarcely believable’!

A British farmer, Richard Goldsworthy, has for a number of years been paid a 100% EU grant (some £15,000 p.a. it seems) to grow 100 tons of linseed fibre flax, which the EU then orders him to DESTROY, because it is considered that the 350 mile journey from his West Wales farm to the processing plant in East Anglia makes the harvesting ‘uneconomical’!

You may think that situation daft enough, that our tax money is paid to grow a crop that is regularly destroyed. But there is more!

Mr. Goldsworthy decided this year to save himself the £1,300 it would have cost to harvest the crop by just ploughing it in. Enter the EU farm inspectors, who were not amused! They took him to court, charging him with obtaining his subsidy by deceit. He was found guilty and fined £1,500.

‘Uneconomical’? Words fail me! TO PROTEST against the World Trade Organisation, which is holding its third Millennium Round meeting in Seattle, USA, from November 27th to December 3rd 1999, contact: “Network Opposed to the WTO - People for a Fair Trade Policy”, address - 2343, NW 100th, Seattle WA, 98177, USA., web page www.tradewatch.org, e-mail gtwinfo@citizen.org.

It is important to resist the WTO, because every one of the one hundred cases that have so far come to it has resulted in a decision favouring corporations! WTO rulings have seriously undermined the environmental health and safety standards of nation states, as well as infringing the rights of governments to act on behalf of their own people or principles.

(An expanded article on this appears in The Ecologist, July 1999 issue, page 256).