François Houtart
in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
The declaration was drafted in the specific context of the national liberation struggles and it is obvious that its content was strongly influenced by them. Today, the context has changed. There are other developments that I think are important to highlight. I will do so from a very specific perspective, which is that of all the crises that we are talking about today and which are indicative of what the new violations of peoples’ rights could be. I would like to highlight three types of crisis:
the cyclical crises with a structural vocation, such as the financial crisis and the food crisis;
the structural crises that call into question the development model as we have known it under the aegis of capitalism and which are the energy crisis and the climate crisis;
the social crisis which takes up all these perspectives.
The financial crisis is obviously characterized by the hypertrophy of financial activity and its overvaluation. There are many reasons for this crisis, which are analysed by Samir Amin, Elmar Altvater, François Morin and others. I am not going to go into the reasons and the analyses proposed by these works. It is important to know that this crisis has an enormous dimension: the valuation of derivatives alone would be $600 million, that is, ten times more than the world’s gross product. This means that financial capital has become a decisive factor in the reproduction of the world economic system and that this is manifested in a series of decisions that will have an impact on producers. This is the problem of the financialization of companies, of the externalities of capitalist accounting that are pushed further and further towards the weakest points, especially in the countries of the South, so as to increase the rates of financial profit with an overexploitation of natural resources and labour.
We are also seeing the development of speculation: on raw materials, on food, and the growth of illegal world trade thanks to the existence of tax havens. In fact, we have entered a phase of savage recomposition of capital with enormous pressure on labour, both in the North and in the South, and an over-exploitation of nature, of natural resources, especially those of the countries of the South.
Speaking of peoples’ rights, I think this reinforces the notions developed earlier, for example the right to natural resources as expressed in Article VIII of the Algiers Declaration. It also calls into question a series of classical factors in the evolution of the capitalist system that have their impact on the rights of peoples in general.
A second crisis that could be called conjunctural but also structural is the food crisis, which has both remote and immediate causes. The distant causes are the progressive liquidation of peasant agriculture in favour of the development of monoculture and the concentration of land, a veritable agrarian counter-reform, with the birth of a capitalist type of productivist agriculture which has a direct influence on food production since it is intended for export and the industrial exploitation of agricultural products.
But there are also more immediate economic elements that have been reflected in the wave of speculation in food, the price of which is essentially set on the Chicago stock exchange. There was a speculative offensive on raw materials, which was followed by a new orientation of speculative capital towards food products. A World Bank report estimated that agrofuels were responsible for 75% of the increase in food prices, directly or indirectly, mainly through speculation. The manifestations of this food crisis have been a significant reduction in stocks, which have fallen from 70 days to 12 days, but also an increase in poverty and therefore in hunger, which has been estimated by the President of the FAO over the last two years at 50 million more people each year, who have fallen below the poverty line and therefore below the line of food insufficiency.
In relation to the rights of peoples, this raises the problem of food sovereignty of peoples and the right to life, the first article of the Algiers Declaration.
The second series of crises, which could be called structural crises because they attack the very basis of the economic development model, is the energy crisis. It is a model of overexploitation of cheap, non-renewable energy since the beginning of the development of industrial capitalism and which has accelerated very sharply over the last thirty years, that is, since neoliberalism, to the point where 84 to 88 million barrels per day are being used and the peak of oil, gas and uranium has already been exceeded in recent years.
The problem has been the overexploitation and overconsumption of energy to develop the model, but also a whole series of consequences, such as the submission of fossil fuels to speculative pressures, climate destruction, ecological debt, wars for the control of energy sources, etc. …
We have thus arrived at a risk of blocking the productive forces, whereas these are essential for the possibility of reproducing a system or for its recomposition. Hence this great fear of energy in the capitalist world today, because it is the reproduction of the system that is at stake, because it is based on an overexploitation of energies and therefore a tendency to an extremely violent recomposition that is at the origin of debts. If we also look at the problem of a certain response that we are trying to give through biofuels, we realize that these are not, as they are often presented, a good response for the climate because the whole cycle of production, transformation and distribution of biofuels is ultimately as damaging in terms of CO2 and greenhouse gas production as the use of fossil fuels. This production, based on mono-cropping dominated by large economic interests, causes social destruction in poor countries by expelling small farmers from their land, in addition to the damage inflicted on the surrounding environment, often using violent methods as in Indonesia or Colombia with the help of paramilitary forces perpetrating real massacres of populations.
If the agrofuel solution is not favourable to the climate, it is hardly favourable to energy, unless the pharaonic plans that are currently being drawn up for the development of agrofuels in Africa, Asia and Latin America are implemented. Hundreds of millions of hectares are to be devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane or oil plants such as palm, soya and jatropha. The latter, in principle, grows in arid regions and could be a solution that would not use food-producing land. But the agribusiness multinationals plan to develop its cultivation in Africa in fertile regions, because its oil yield would be much better. These plans for monocultures are very serious, because, if they are carried out, it means a massive destruction of biodiversity and soils, because of pesticides and fertilizers, water pollution and drying up. It can be considered a real disaster from the point of view of the surrounding environment: the disappearance of forests, of areas currently producing food crops and the expulsion, according to estimates, of 60 million small farmers. With all the consequences in terms of migration to urban centres. In fact, the insistence on developing agrofuels is more related to the short and medium term profit of multinationals.
All of this also affects the rights of peoples, including the right to natural resources, the right to energy sovereignty, the right to peasant agriculture, the right to food, the right to territory in a slightly different sense than that defined by Article III of the Algiers Declaration, the right to ecology (Article XVI) and the right of indigenous peoples.
The second aspect of the structural crisis is the climate crisis. It has parallel effects to the energy crisis. It is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases which are increasingly being released into the atmosphere. In 2007, despite the efforts made, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was 2%. The increase in greenhouse gases has been particularly high since the 1970s, coinciding with the neoliberal era of global capitalism. The same applies to the increase in temperature, which also began a steep upward curve in the 1970s. The long-term consequences are certainly much more serious than what the powers that be are currently saying. One example is the rise in sea levels. Among the most striking phenomena is the melting of glaciers and ice floes, but also the weakening of the effectiveness of carbon sinks such as forests and oceans. They are losing their absorption capacity. The original forests, estimated to total 418 million hectares, are gradually being destroyed at a rate of 15 million hectares per year. The CO2 absorption capacity of the oceans is decreasing due to the increase in water temperature.
We are therefore faced with the dual phenomenon of the increase in the production of greenhouse gases and CO2 and the decrease in their absorption by forests and oceans. The effects are worrying for the near future: pressure on biodiversity, disappearance of certain plant and animal species. Experts from the IPCC, the international group of climate specialists, estimate that if the temperature rises by 2.5°C, between 20 and 30% of species will disappear, as well as the natural resources available to humanity. They have just revised their calculations in 2009, and speak of one centigrade.
There are also economic effects, because already now, the rise in sea levels is causing the disappearance of species in the Pacific, increased risks of flooding in certain regions such as Bangladesh, which is threatened with losing 17% of its territory, while elsewhere the increase in heat is causing a water crisis that is becoming more and more pronounced, such as in the Sahel or in Central Asia. It has also been calculated, for example, that if the temperature rises by one degree, India could lose 40% of its rice production, and there are many other examples.
With the Kyoto agreements, we have seen the creation of an institution that is truly in line with the logic of capitalism to supposedly solve the climate problems, the famous “carbon exchanges” with the possibility of continuing to pollute on condition that they finance reforestation projects in Eastern Europe or in Third World countries. This is a hoax. For example, the eucalyptus plantations in Minas Gerais, which dry out the soil and are used to make charcoal for the state’s steel industry. The wood is burned on site, sending a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is included in the Kyoto agreement as reforestation and the result is even more CO2 emissions. Another example is the use of GMOs by foreign multinationals, especially in China, in order to participate in the CO2 exchange, under the pretext of greater productive efficiency.
There are also very important socio-political effects (report by Nicolas Stern of the World Bank). If the situation does not change, by the middle of the century there could be between 150 and 200 million climate migrants, i.e. no longer able to live on their own soil, with all the foreseeable social consequences, such as the wall that is being built between India and Bangladesh to prevent this emigration. For the rights of peoples, the right to biodiversity, the right to traditional knowledge, the right to migration, the right to planning to solve these problems are at stake.
The social crisis is the result of all these factors. It is the model itself of a spectacular growth of 20% of the population that is the result. It is more advantageous for capital and its accumulation to produce sophisticated goods for 20% of the population than to produce essential goods for the rest of the population who have little or no purchasing power. This is not the result of an accident, it is not a problem of delayed development. It is a problem generated by the very logic of the capitalist system.
With regard to the rights of peoples, we are faced with all the rights mentioned above, plus the right to life for the majority of the world’s population. The conclusion is that all these rights are linked to a fundamental duty to transform the economic system, the need for alternatives and not only for crisis regulation as the G20 is presenting it today. And this finally leads to a right, difficult to express in a legal form, the right to socialism.
Houtart, François