SERMON
We,
the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to
affirm and promote: the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and
justice for all. Sounds a little like
globalization doesn't it … or does it?
Unitarians,
Universalists and Unitarian Universalists have long been known for our interest
in promoting more harmonious international relations. We appreciate the diversity of cultures and religions and draw
inspiration, insight and stimulation through the exploration of different
traditions. We desire that the myriad
peoples of the world find peace, their relations be conducted fairly and all
have the liberty to create meaningful and productive lives.
This
sounds a little like globalization but actually turns out to be the opposite of
where the world is headed right now, particularly for those with few or no
resources. A recognition of something
being radically wrong with the cheery advance of globalization has stimulated
the selection of it as our Study/Action Issue at last summer's Unitarian
Universalist Association's General Assembly.
Its selection begins a two year process. The first year all the member congregations are asked to study
the issue. We may then propose
suggestions for how to frame this issue into a "statement of
conscience" which will be proposed at this summer's GA. We'll get this proposed language back next
fall and have a chance to do our own wordsmithing and send back our edits. These modifications are reviewed and
combined into a final statement of conscience.
That statement will be proposed, amended and passed or rejected at the
GA in 2003 and become part of our religious identity as an association of
congregations.
After
the service today, please join me in Stott Lounge to discuss
globalization. We'll do the first phase
of this process of giving our input and suggestions. Next fall the Social Responsibility Committee and the
Denominational Affairs Committee are planning to work together to expand this
process. Watch for more details in the
fall.
A
good way to get a handle on the huge topic of globalization is to analyze,
briefly, one of the primary institutions that supports it: the World Bank. The World Bank, along with the International
Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization form the superstructure of
globalization. The International Monetary
Fund stabilizes currencies, the World Trade Organization sets the rules for
international trade, and the World Bank assists developing nations to
participate in the global marketplace.
They
were the result of a meeting by leaders from 43 countries in Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire in the summer of 1944. Their
aims were to help rebuild the shattered postwar economy and to promote
international economic cooperation. Led
by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, chief economic advisor Harry Dexter
White and British economist John Maynard Keynes, they wanted to establish a
postwar economic order based on notions of consensual decision-making and
cooperation in the realm of trade and economic relations. The leaders of the Allied countries felt
that a multilateral framework was needed to overcome the destabilizing effects
of previous global economic depression and trade battles.(1)
In
his opening speech at the Bretton Woods conference, Henry Morganthau said the
"bewilderment and bitterness" resulting from the Depression became
"the breeders of fascism, and finally, of war". Proponents of the new
institutions felt that global economic interaction was necessary to maintain
international peace and security. The institutions would facilitate, in
Morganthau's words, "[the] creation of a dynamic world community in which
the peoples of every nation will be able to realize their potentialities in
peace". (2) Sounds wonderful
doesn't it? Unfortunately visions and
realities sometimes work against each other.
The
vision of the World Bank from its inception has been to lift people out of
poverty and set them on the road to prosperity. All markets require participants. There is no point in making products unless there are people to
buy them. The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund were instrumental in jump starting and rebuilding the
European economy after the Second World War.
Today their major focus is halving the number of people in poverty by
the year 2015.(3) This is a major
challenge as half the world's population earns less than two dollars a day and
the population is expected to grow by 2 billion in the next 25 years.
How
will the World Bank work toward this praiseworthy end? By collaborating with national government
leaders to follow an investment and economic development plan that will assist
them in participating more fully in the global marketplace. As each nation buys and sells more and more
in the marketplace, all will prosper as the rising monetary tide floats
everyone's boat higher and higher. This
is how Europe recovered from the war and this is the same strategy that will
work for everyone else. The wealthy nations give the poorer nations a hand to
join in international trade and increase their people's standard of living.
Sounds
good doesn't it? Then why have their
been so many protests against the Bretton Woods institutions? Why did so many people turn up to protest
the WTO in Seattle?
To
answer these questions, we need to do a little reality testing. One way to sort out what really happens when
the wealthy nations extend their hand to help the poorer nations is to look at
a specific example. I'm indebted to
Bill Batt for his help directing me to Arundhati Roy (4), an Indian novelist
and political activist who writes about a big development project supported by
the World Bank.
In
the central Indian province of Madhya Pradesh begins the mighty Narmada
river. The river winds its way through
800 miles of broad-leaved forest and fertile agricultural land supporting about
25 million people. The Indian
government has been working for 40 years to build an extensive network of dams
on this river.
I
want to focus our attention on big dams because the World Bank has been
intimately involved in building many of them.
The reason for this is because water is a path to wealth. Engineering advances in the 20th
century allowed us to build bigger and safer dams. The World Bank saw building dams as a way to promote economic
development in poor countries. They
were touted as having three primary advantages. Damning a river controls flooding and saves water for use during
dry seasons. Having a ready source of
water year round allows irrigation to increase agricultural productivity. Finally, water is one of the cheapest ways
to produce electricity. Again, building
dams sounds like a great way to lift a region out of poverty.
Let's
look more closely at the solution to see if it indeed does hold water. The first problem to consider with the goals
of flood control, irrigation and power generation is that they conflict with
each other. Often dams are oversold in their capacity to store and distributed
water and generate electricity. To
control flooding, the reservoir needs to be kept somewhat empty. But to supply a high volume of immediately
available water for drinking and irrigation, the dam needs to be kept full all
the time. Keeping the dam full prevents
release of water for the generation of electricity. The lower the reservoir is kept to prevent flooding, the more
pumping is required to lift the water into irrigation canals, often higher than
the reservoir. In fact geography can
demand that much of the electricity generated be used to run the irrigation
pumps.
The
next question to ask about big dams is their effect on the environment. The shift from purely engineering concerns
about efficiency to the effects on flora and fauna darkens the picture. The most obvious concern is the loss of
arable land and everything on it.
Forests, meadows, and habitat disappear either displacing the wildlife
or drowning it. Towns and villages are
submerged destroying those communities.
What
is less apparent is what happens to the river itself. Rivers do not only transport water. They also move sediment.
Once a river is dammed, the sediment stays behind the dam and starves
the river for small stones and silt.
That sediment is very important to the ecology of a river. Without it the river begins eroding the
riverbed more quickly often lowering the water table. The delta and shoreline around the mouth of a river as it flows
into the sea can erode without replenishment. Salt water intrudes up the river basin as its flow
decreases. Fish breeding can be
endangered as their trip upstream to spawn is blocked and the gravel they use
to hide their eggs disappears. Studying systematically the effects of big dams
has shown scientists they have many drawbacks.
Rivers aren't dammed to serve their
ecology. They are dammed to serve
people. So now let us turn our
attention to who is being served.
Most
obviously not being served are the displaced poor people the World Bank claims
to be striving to lift out of poverty.
Arundhati Roy's recounting of the history of big dam building in India
is a horror story for those displaced by dams.
Big promises are made to the people whose land will be flooded. The reality has been little or nothing is done
to resettle or compensate people for their land. In a place like India with a huge population, there is no place
to relocate displaced people without displacing someone else from their land
and livelihood. And the cost of doing a
good job of relocation is prohibitive since most of the money allocated for a
big dam projects goes into constructing it and dealing with predictable cost
overruns.
In
the non-cash economy of primitive village life in India, all one's worldly
wealth is in one's house and land.
Subsistence farmers' only economic gain comes from what they can raise
on their land or gather from a nearby forest.
When displaced, that farmer has no resources. Even if the government gives that person a few Rupees for their
land, the peasant can do little to convert that cash into a new way to make a
living. Listen to how Roy graphically
describes their challenge:
For the people who've been
resettled, everything has to be relearned. Every little thing, every big thing:
from [defecating] and [urinating] (where d'you do it when there's no jungle to
hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understanding
money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders.
Learning to have masters. Learning to answer only when you're addressed. (5)
A
farmer who is able to live well on what he can grow and gather from the forest
has nothing when they disappear under the rising waters. The dam might as well drown those farmers
for almost all will not be able to recover the loss of their way of living.
How
about the farmers with access to irrigation the dam provides? Will they benefit? That depends if they are small farmers or large corporate
farmers. Irrigation is expensive and
geographically disruptive if the canal cuts across the farmer's land. Canals usually do not follow natural
drainage paths, often cutting across them and disrupting them. Modifying the topology of the land to
reroute the drainage patterns to make them compatible with the canals is very
expensive and usually isn't done. The
result can be waterlogged soil that cannot be used at all for cultivation. Irrigation also has the nasty side effect of
drawing salts in the soil to the surface.
If the salinity of the soil rises too high nothing will grow on it.
The
economic boon, the straw into gold trick of irrigation, is increasing the
growing season. In India, instead of
only one growing season a year, there can be three or four. Thus the land can be far more
productive. The new abundance of water
can change the kind of crop that is grown.
Instead of growing crops that require little water such as maize, barley
and millet, the farmer can now grow water guzzling cash crops like cotton,
rice, soy beans and the biggest guzzler of all, sugar cane. (6)
Why
now grow a cash crop? Because now the
water costs money rather than falling from the sky freely, on the just and
unjust, on the rich and poor alike. Now
the farmer is gradually forced into the global economy and becomes one of its
suppliers. Most likely the cost of that
water and fertilizer needed to amend soil depletion will just about cover what the crops will bring. No longer self-sufficient, the farmer still
has nothing but now has become completely dependent on foreign markets. And when they decline, the farmer goes into
debt.
The
promises sounded wonderful just like the high sounding ideals of the World
Bank. Unfortunately these poor people
are not the ones benefiting from these big dam projects. To find out who really benefits we must look
further.
Few,
if any, dams are currently being built here in the United States. In fact, we are in the expensive process of
dismantling some of them to rectify the environmental damage they've done. Where do the companies who build dams
go? The same place companies whose
pesticides have been banned go - to the developing world where government
officials can be bought with promises and sometimes bribes. Bankers make money when it is loaned for big
construction projects. Developers,
bankers, and government officials all fatten themselves at the trough
"helping" raise poor people's standard of living.
At
the end of the pipeline though, it is you and me who are cooperating with the
flooding of those people's lands through our economic demand for cash crops like
sugar, coffee, chocolate, bananas, and out of season fruit. We want those cheaper prices at Walmart for
clothing, driven down by flooding the market with cheap cotton, driving all but
large American corporate growers out of business. We, the shareholders, demand profits for our retirement accounts,
encouraging companies like GE to sell the turbines to generate electricity from
that Indian dam. Yes, our Western values and lifestyle are the ones driving and
benefiting from globalization.
We
can't fault the World Bank for this.
The World Bank is driven by the same ethic that drives our society. We define quality of life economically. The World Bank sums up the quality of life
of the world's poor with a number. They
earn under $2 a day. What are completely
lost in this economic view of reality are the real indicators of quality of
life. What I eat is a necessary yet
tiny part of what a quality life is about.
The more important questions are:
what is the quality of my environment?
What is the quality of my social life?
What is the quality of my spiritual life? Current trends in globalization are not focused on improving the
quality of the environment, or social life or spiritual life. Current trends in globalization are working
against our principle of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for
all.
I
know I'm short on time and there is no happy ending yet to this sermon. Tremendous forces are at work to make things
worse not better. We must wake up to
our complicity in globalization and make hard choices about how we live our
lives. If there is any hope for the
poor, it will come from consciously redirecting our personal sources of
sustenance, pleasure and meaning toward a reintegration of the world economy
around self-sufficiency and ecologically sound sustainability.
If
we don't, the suffering the world will rightly rest on our shoulders.
Copyright
© 2002 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.
(1) http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/about/background.htm#01
(2) ibid
(excellent source on these institutions activities)
(3) World Bank Annual Report for 2001 http://www.worldbank.org/annualreport/
(4) Roy, Arundhati, Power Politics, South End
Press, Cambridge, MA © 2001
(5) Roy, Arundhati, The Cost of Living, Modern
Library, NY, NY © 1999, p 54
(6) Ibid p. 68