MAKE WEALTH HISTORY

I’m always keen to write about good things here and feature people who are really making a difference, and the other day I met some people who fit the bill. Shared Interest describe themselves as “the Fairtrade movement’s best kept secret”. They are, basically, a financing co-operative that funds new ethical businesses. We’ve profiled similar groups before, such as OikoCredit, but those mainly operate in the microfinance market, whereas Shared Interest can offer much larger loans.

By providing start-up loans and business support, Shared Interest works to see poor communities make use of trade opportunities, in line with the Fairtrade principles. By 2007, they had distributed £21million, and if all goes to plan they will have shifted £75million by 2012.

At the other end, Shared Interest works by members pooling their resources. The £21million above has been raised from the 8,500 members, who have all contributed between £100 and £20,000. This is an investment, not a gift, so it pays a return and can be withdrawn if necessary. The returns are less than the market rate, but it’s about putting your money into something worthwhile, and who our money works for is always an important question. If you believe in ethical business, and want to participate more actively in the fairtrade movement than just buying an occasional pot of coffee, here’s your chance.

National Vegetarian Week starts on monday 19th. I’m not a vegetarian myself, more of a conscientious meat-eater (ie occasional, and hopefully discerning), but I see plenty of reasons why it makes sense, for sustainability, animal welfare and health reasons.

So, in the interests of research, Paul and I will be joining the UK’s 7 million vegetarians for the week from the 19th to the 25th. We’ll write about some of the issues around meat eating, and we’ll let you know how we get on.

If you’ve ever thought about vegetarianism, or just eating less meat, why not join us? We’ll all experiment together, and perhaps some of us will even stick with it afterwards.

For starters, investigate the Vegetarian Society website for some tips, or visit the healthy eating section of the Nutrition Foundation to make sure you get a balanced diet. And if its recipes you’re after, I like the BBC food archives. Just tick the vegetarian box and get searching.

Military spending and foreign aid are almost opposites. Not only is one about life and the other about death, military spending actually creates the need for aid. So you might hope that we put more money towards development and aid than we do towards the means to kill, but in fact our priorities are completely upside-down.

Aid or defence?
A quote from a book I was reading on Planet Management struck me hard.

“Count out 60 seconds and 3 of the world’s children will have died for lack of safe water/sanitation. Count out another 60 seconds, and within these two minutes the world will have spent $3.4 million on its military.”

In 2004 (when the quote above was written) the world spent approximately $1100 billion on instruments of death while billions of people were already fighting for their lives against hunger, thirst and disease. Over half of this ($623 billion) was spent by the United States (Second came China who spent $65 billion). That same year, ‘The Land of the Free’ spent $1 in aid for every $19 in defence. In 2005, the UK spent $42.8 billion on the military compared to the $1 billion spent by Bangladesh. Most of these figures are so huge they’re almost meaningless.

While the UK spent its $42 billion on the military, $10.75 billion was set aside for Official Development Assistance (ODA). In one year when the US spent over $600 billion on war and defence, it spent a meager $27.46 billion on ODA.

Between 1945 and 2000 there have been an estimated 50 million unnecessary deaths due to war and conflict. The number of deaths each year from social neglect reaches 7 million people (3.7 million deaths from malnutrition, 1.7 million from lack of sanitation, and 1.6 million from indoor smoke from cooking fires, for example) and yet in 2000, military spending from the “developed countries” was ten times the amount spent on aid.

Budgeting priorities
A year into the 2003 Iraq war, the United States had already spent $150 billion. Put to better use, this same amount of money would have provided better health care for 82 million American children. Internationally, that amount of money would have halved world hunger, leaving enough petty change to supply HIV/AIDS vaccines, childhood immunization, and clean water to developing countries for over two years. Rather than do that, the money was spent on such weapons as the “cruise missile”, one of which costs $800,000 (320 were launched at Baghdad). Between 2000 and 2005, America alone spent $2.2 trillion on military activities.

Sometimes the military is prioritised over basic education at home. In 2004 the US spent $413 billion on military and $437 billion on defence yet left only $60 billion for education. Poorer countries are often no better. In 2004 Ethiopia spent 5.2% of its GDP on the military and 4.8% on education, 1.8% on health. Costa Rica sets a better example with 4.4% spent on education and health and 0% on the military.

In 2003 the ‘developing countries’ spent $245 billion on military activities between them. It is estimated that an extra $6 billion would have been required to send 115 million children to school.

Missing targets, failing promises
As if this wasn’t all bad enough, we can’t even deliver the pittance in aid that we’ve promised to the poor. According to Oxfam:

“the latest figures represent the clearest sign yet that governments are badly off track for meeting G8 and EU goals for increasing aid spending, and are therefore in serious danger of breaking their promises to the developing world.”

The G8 leader’s summit in Gleneagles in 2005 pledged an increase of $50 billion by 2010, but Oxfam’s calculations predict a shortfall of $30 billion. Only Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden and Norway have met the promise made by rich countries in 1970 to give 0.7 % of their gross national income (GNI) as aid. Sadly, that percentage has fallen for two years in a row.

Are we as generous as we think?
According to George Bush, speaking just last week, “The American people are generous people and they’re a compassionate people. We believe in the timeless truth, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected’.” It would be nice if that were true. In the league tables of aid as a percentage of overall income, the US comes second to last. The US economy is vast, so the actual figures are still high, but it simply can’t be said that Bush believes in the much given, much expected principle. The US gives away just 0.18% of it’s income, against a global average of 0.31%, and a promised target of 0.7%.

Americans aren’t aware of this. A poll asked people to guess what percentage of the annual budget was set aside for aid, and they guessed it was around 20%. The truth is nearer 1.6%. And that’s the budget. Put that into the overall income, and you’ve got the 0.18% figure quoted above.

It’s a hard truth, and the same poll found that people didn’t believe it when they were told, but check the stats and see for yourself. It’s vital that people know this, or they’ll assume that everything is fine and nothing will change.

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It seems humanity has reached a stage where destruction is endorsed over restoration. As people die and the environment with it, the world invests in death over life - forget sustainability for a moment - this is a matter of simple morality.

What can we do?

• We can talk about it. Do you know how much your country gives in aid? Ignorance of the needs is a big problem - why would you campaign on poverty issues if you already think that your country gives away 20% of it’s income already?
• Our governments have promised 0.7%. Let’s hold them to it. Most countries are going to miss that target (the UK is on track here). Write to your representatives and remind them.
• Support campaigns already working here. Oxfam, Make Poverty History and so on are doing good work already.
• Campaign to reduce military spending. This is a big one, because war is immensely profitable. It’s a matter of priorities. For example, the UK is considering replacing it’s nuclear arsenal. A new generation may cost as much as £76 billion, a phenomenal amount of money on an utterly obsolete technology - what use have we got for nuclear weapons now that the Cold War is over? Modern conflicts are completely different. Write to your MP urging them not to vote for any replacement to Trident. There are some good suggestions here.

May 18th marks the 10 year anniversary of Drop the Debt’s giant demonstration in Birmingham that called for the cancellation of third world debts. This year they will re-form in Birmingham to mark the occasion, remember what has been achieved, and call for further debt relief.

The debt crisis enjoyed a brief moment in the political spotlight around the turn of the millennium, and quite a lot was accomplished for the world’s poorest countries. Make Poverty History continued that work, but I get the feeling it’s dropped off the agenda a little. Hopefully the gathering on the 18th will remind the world that it still has promises to deliver, as the debt is still very much with us.

The problem now is actually delivering the debt relief that has been gradually announced over the last ten years. The main issue here is the long list of conditions that accompany the offer, often stacked in favour of richer nations - conditions include privatizing assets, opening up markets and liberalizing trade, and cutting public spending, all of which are likely to hurt the poor. This is all carried out through the IMF, who demand absolute compliance for at least three years before you can even begin their Heavily Indebted Countries Initiative. As has been well documented, the IMF is a deeply biased organization that has shown little care for the poor or real understanding of development. Much of the delay in delivering debt relief is down to their dogged application of the formula, making the governments of poor countries jump through economic hoops while their populations suffer and die. Some countries have successfully navigated the HIPC programme, including Madagascar I’m pleased to say, but it takes ten years, and that’s too long. We’ve had a decade of giving with one hand and taking away with the other, and we need to cut back the conditions.

To find out more about what you can do, visit the Jubilee Debt Campaign website. If you would like to go along to the Birmingham rally, the details are here.

• Having just moved to Luton, I’ve just been reading up on who my MP is so I could write to them about this issue. If you’re interested in doing this too, let me share a couple more links. You can find out more about who your MP is and what they’re interested in at Theyworkforyou.com. Once you know who you’re writing to (you need to write to your own MP), write a short letter that explains your point, and what you’d like them to do. There are some useful tips here at the Open rights group. Try not to use form letters or copied and pasted points, as these are essentially spam. But if it helps, my letter is here in Word format: third-world-debt-mp-letter

‘Jungle Capitalists - a Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution’ is the extraordinary story of the United Fruit company and their dealings in Central America.

The company began almost by accident in Costa Rica, with a railway constructor called Minor Keith growing bananas to sell to his workers. Once the railway line was in place and bananas could be shipped to the coast for export to the States, Keith realised he’d stumbled upon a remarkable business model. Over the next few years, railway lines were offered to many Central American governments in return for land, and exemption from taxes. The end result was huge plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the ‘Great White Fleet’ delivering to New Orleans and Boston, and a highly profitable emerging market for the banana.

As time went on, and the fortunes being made by the banana magnates failed to trickle down to the countries growing the fruit, there was unrest, and this is where United Fruit developed an unusual speciality - regime change. If the usual bribery and blackmail wasn’t enough to keep the land grants and tax breaks, the company would pay local rebels, or hire in mercenaries. The governments of Honduras and Guatemala were overthrown. The attempt to overthrow Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion was a memorable failure.

The company gets its comeuppance, which is always satisfying for such a story. United Fruit overstretched itself and collapsed in scandal and the suicide of its CEO in the 1970s. It was sold off in pieces, and lives on in a much smaller size as Chiquita.

What’s interesting about United Fruit is the way it pioneered a number of business practices in poorer countries that are followed by plenty of others today. Having read a lot on oil recently, I was struck at the similarities - government troops in Colombia intervened to violently quash a worker protest on a United Fruit plantation in 1929, and a massacre ensued. Today, local and US troops patrol Colombia’s pipelines, massacres have been carried out in the name of oil companies in Nigeria. In 2003 there was a failed coup in the tiny West African island of Sao Tome, an attempt to seize control of its extensive off-shore oil deposits. Were ExxonMobil involved, hoping a corrupt military government would be easier to work with than the democratically elected president? Perhaps we’ll know in a few years time, if the secrets of the oil companies are ever told.

Another aspect to the story is the United States’ casual disregard for the sovereignty of other countries when their business interests are a stake. The CIA feature regularly in the United Fruit story, and the company wielded considerable political clout, not least in the 1950. John Foster Dulles, a former lawyer for United Fruit, was Secretary of State. His Brother, Allen Dulles, was head of the CIA. It was during that era that the government of Guatemala was overthrown, ostensibly to prevent a communist uprising of course, but also because United Fruit had just lost some of their land concessions. Again, I can’t help thinking of oil, and the fact that Condoleeza Rice, a woman with a Chevron oil tanker named after her, has the power to overthrow countries and start wars in her role as National Security Advisor.

Finally, United Fruit are notable for pioneering PR. They were clients of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and not coincidentally the godfather of public relations. Applying the principles of Freudian psychology to advertising, Bernays developed the ideas of product placement, celebrity endorsement, and selling things with sex. For United Fruit, he publicized their (occasional) philanthropic endeavours in Central America, made educational films and radio programmes, and set up a MiddleAmerica Information Bureau to inform journalists about the realities of life in the growing regions. He encouraged United Fruit to donate to the exploration of the archaeological ruins that had been uncovered in the course of their jungle-clearing. Around this time United Fruit also developed the cartoon pin-up of Senorita Chiquita Banana, the singing, dancing banana, pre-empting characters from Ronald McDonald to Coco the monkey. Of course, these are all tricks we’re very familiar with today. You can’t spend long in a Starbucks without finding some assertion of their good works in developing countries, despite the fact that you have to specifically ask for Fairtrade at the counter. And of course the educational film. I collect short films, and the one below is one of my favourite bits of corporate propaganda.

Anyway, I recommend Jungle Capitalists. Peter Chapman tells the tale like a spy thriller, and it’s an easy and engaging read. There are some asides about the crisis in banana genetics (see this earlier post), and the consumer discovery of the banana is particularly fascinating, with bananas on display in exhibitions, served as delicacies, and celebrated in song. The book could have done with a bit of an update on the state of the world fruit business today and the whole Fairtrade issue, but I guess you can’t cover everything.

There was good news this week as new figures show that recycling has gone up 27% between 2002 and 2006. A third of UK households are now recycling, and that means less waste is going to landfill. Well, a little bit less - we sent 16.1 million tons to landfill in 2007, down from 16.9 million tons in 2006 - but it’s headed in the right direction.

However, I was confronted with a question the other day, something that had never occurred to me. I was asked “Do you know where your recycling goes?”. I replied quickly that “it goes to the recycling place and gets recycled” to which an equally swift response interrupted me. “How do you know it actually goes there? or do you just assume thats where it went?”. I remained silent.

We are always told “Recycle”, “Recycling is the Future” and those of us who actually do it nowadays do so almost without thinking. Black bin bags, clear bin bags - simple. Every week one or the other if not both are off our hands and driven away in the back of trucks and we think nothing else of it. We trust they are going to be recycled but considering its only rubbish, we don’t give it any second thoughts. I think second thoughts is exactly what we need to be giving!

There are over 3000 items that can be recycled. Tyres, bicycles, signposts, pillows, cushion covers, ball point pens, hose pipes, coat pegs, lighting, water butts, printer cartridges, scissors, fencing, litter bins, animal bedding, pallets, clocks, tableware, soap dishes to name a few (those don’t include items made from paper). We don’t catch an awful lot of what we could be recycling - according to Richard Girling’s book “Rubbish”, the UK produces over 450, 000 tons of plastic bottles every year of which just 5% are recycled (approx. 22,500 tons). The remainder of this goes one of two places: needlessly to landfill, or to China/India. But where does that lucky 5% go?

Well, unfortunately, the bottles we carefully pick out may end up in exactly the same places. The telegraph reports “240,000 tons of paper, glass and plastic is either dumped or burned after being collected in green bins and bags by local council staff”. When council recycling practices were surveyed last year, large gaps were uncovered. In some areas, as many as one in eight items put out for recycling ended up being dumped. Paul Bettison, chairman of the Local Government Association Environment Board, points out that 240,000 tons of non-recycled recycling is only 1.6 per cent of the total collected, but it’s a big number and it doesn’t inspire confidence. If a third of us recycle, this is just the kind of story that may deter the other two thirds from starting.

But that’s not the end of it. Every council has targets to meet, and faces fines if they do not reduce the amount of waste they send to landfill. Sometimes the targets run ahead of the facilities available, and that leaves a choice to either miss the targets and pay the fine, or export the recycling for processing elsewhere. Research in Wales last year tracked bales of cardboard to Indonesia, glass to Brazil, plastic to China and cans to India. “It’s hardly the most sustainable policy and grossly counter-productive,” said Plaid Cymru minister Leanne Wood.

This would perhaps be understandable if our local recycling plants were overworked, but the trade in waste is motivated by profits, not sustainability ideals. Chinese recyclers pay well for our trash - £120 a ton, where UK recyclers can generally only offer £50 a ton. It’s an irresistable deal to the waste companies. “The Chinese put me out of business,” said one UK recycler. “Everyone has lost supplies to China. The local market is being starved of materials. Hundreds of brokers are buying up the plastic and shipping it out.”

In 2004, the Guardian reported that China was “running at 200,000 tonnes of plastic rubbish and 500,000 tonnes of paper and cardboard a year”. China received approximately a third of all the recycled plastic collected.

Again, this might be okay, if it could be proved that this was the most cost-effective and sustainable way of dealing with our waste. But Greenpeace in China takes a very different view, pointing out that standards are not the same as the UK. Waste is brought in mixed, and then sorted by hand by the poorest and most desperate immigrant labourers. The waste is ‘processed’, not necessarily recycled. Much of it is burned. Greenpeace’s Martin Baker puts it plainly: “I would say that Britain is dumping its rubbish in the name of recycling.”

Pro-recycling campaigners portray recycling as almost charitable. It’s something we’re all supposed to feel good about doing, but it’s a business like any other, and there’s a roaring trade going on behind our backs as our discarded bottles and cans become commodities in global marketplace.

It strikes me as rather dishonest that councils continue to play up recycling as a good cause when it is actually being dumped, burned or sent abroad. But before we lose all hope and abandon recycling altogether we should rethink a few things - it’s all very well being disappointed with our councils, but if we didn’t produce so much waste in the first place we wouldn’t encounter the problem. This is just a testament to the sheer amount of rubbish we produce. We produce more waste than we can recycle, so we can hardly complain when the recycling doesn’t happen.

So what can be done? We’re trying to recycle but now it turns out it just goes to landfill. Whats the point of it all?

This is what we suggest:

• Use less, make less waste. Again, buy local. Reuse the same bottle. i.e Buy from the market where items come unwrapped and you can take them home in a backpack.
• What you do have to buy, make sure it can be recycled. Reduce not only the amount you send to landfill but also what you recycle. Recycling is not an excuse for producing an unsustainable amount of junk.
• Write to your council to see what their practices are, and encourage them to process waste locally.
• Much of the recycling that is dumped in the UK is contaminated. Councils also dump waste and use contamination as an excuse. To avoid that happening, make sure you clean out bottles and tins, and sort recycling well.
• If you send your recyling mixed, avoid putting broken glass in the box. That may result in it being dumped too.

For more information, i would suggest reading the articles linked above, and Richard Girling’s book I mentioned, Rubbish. Jeremy has talked about it before and it definitely highlights how dirty our hands really are.

Here is an article on recycling in the US. Things are a little different across the pond.

UK Supermarket giant Tesco launched a new labeling system last week to indicate the carbon footprint of various products. With hopes for wider adoption and even a new industry code, the symbols will start out on just 20 different items.

But would you know what the numbers mean?

Read the report on Celsias…

I’ve been looking out for this film for some time, and it finally arrives in London this month. It follows on rather nicely from our previous post on e-waste.  Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who specialises in man-made landscapes of the worst kind - the unseen face of consumer culture. It may be huge factory floors, piles of spent tyres, or a quarry, all printed up on a large and striking scale.

Documentary maker Jennifer Baichwal traces his journey around China in the film Manufactured Landscapes, capturing the flipside of China’s rush to industrialise.

If you get a chance, get out and see it. You still might need to seek out a smaller theatre, but it should be worth the effort.

We’ve reported on this before, but the issue of dumped e-waste is back in the news today. There was good news last year as the new Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive came into force in the UK, supposedly to prevent the exporting of old computers for processing in the developing world. But children in Ghana and Nigeria are still stripping down waste PCs for scrap, without any protection from the toxic materials that lurk behind the plastic shells of every piece of obsolete electronic gear.

The problem is a loophole in the law that allows old computers to be sent to poorer countries for re-use in schools and hospitals. Unfortunately, no one is responsible for checking whether the machines being dispatched are re-usable or not. Scrap merchants are able to send e-waste abroad by saying it’s for re-use, and nobody will be any the wiser. Every month Lagos takes delivery of half a million scrapped computers, and only one in four is in any working order. The other three are officially illegal - a pretty huge failure of the well-intentioned WEEE guidelines.

What can you do?

• First of all, don’t replace your computer, mobile, or any electronic equipment as often. Upgrade rather than replace computers, and for non-upgradeable hardware, buy the best you can afford first time round and keep it as long as you can.
• If you are replacing something, give it to Computer Aid or a similar charity. Find out a bit about them first if you can - not every charity is going to be bona fide in this area, considering this is the main way waste electronics end up in Africa.
• Under the WEEE directive, manufacturers are responsible for dismantling and processing the machines they produced. If you’re disposing of something that’s broken or not fit for re-use, you can take it back to the place you bought it. Read your rights here at the Environent Agency website.
• If you’re replacing a mobile, you can read more about them specifically here.

The banana is one of the world’s most important food sources. Only rice, wheat and milk feed more people than bananas, whether the cooking variety eaten across Africa and the Americas, or the dessert varieties enjoyed as snacks or breakfasts across the West. They’re also very profitable – out of their vast ranges, the only things that generate more profits for supermarkets are petrol and lottery tickets. In the UK we devour around 70 each a year.

But we should enjoy the banana while we can, because it is actually in considerable danger. As a species, the banana as we know is liable to collapse at any moment, and its story is an interesting case study in industrialised food production.

It’s an odd plant, the banana. We used to grow them in our garden in Madagascar, in two different varieties, and they’re unlike any other tree I can think of. Although called a tree, it’s technically an over-sized herb – a single stem that unfurls into broad and delicate leaves. It produces a rubbery, purple, heart-shaped cluster, and as the layers of this cluster peel back on themselves the little rows of bananas appear. In time, the plant will yield a great ‘hand’ of bananas, an odd stack of up-turned bunches that can grow so heavy that the whole plant tilts threateningly at the ground. Come harvest time, the plant is cut down. Each stem gets one harvest, one 12 month life-cycle, and then another is planted in its place.

This is the great weakness of the banana – it’s rubbish at reproducing itself. Or at least, it’s rubbish at being reproducible at industrial capacity. It’s a jungle plant. It was never meant to exist in huge plantations, and it hasn’t responded well to efforts to tame it. Basically, as it’s difficult to extract seeds from bananas, farmers tend to plant cuttings from existing trees. Each year, as one generation of trees is cut down at harvest time, the next generation of cuttings is growing. This means that across huge plantations of thousands of trees, every plant is from the same genetic stock - each tree is essentially a clone of its neighbour.

There are over 300 varieties of banana, chunky and thin ones, little and large, round and square, bitter and sweet. But we only know one kind. In the early days of the banana trade, it was decided which variety appealed most to consumers. Out of all the options, the one that would sell best would be a banana that looked good, wasn’t too big, and more importantly, was sturdy and thick-skinned enough to survive transportation. The banana companies settled on the ‘Big Mike’. Every plantation grew Big Mike. For decades it was the top banana, the only banana. But then came Panama disease, a choking wilt that destroyed whole plantations at a stroke. Because each plant is a clone, there’s no opportunity for cross-fertilisation, no chance to develop a resistance in the next generation. Whole crops were lost.

The answer was to increase fertilization, pumping the plants with copper sulphate and lime. The plants grew taller and were at greater risk from hurricanes, and plantation workers reported cancers and infertility, but the bananas survived Panama disease. But then came Sigatoka, another devastating plague, rampaging through Big Mike’s weakened genetic stock. By the 1950s, Big Mike had been wiped out.

The bananas we enjoy today are the Cavendish variety, the disease-resistant replacement to Big Mike. But, the same problems still exist. Bananas are still grown from cuttings, and we still make the mistake of only growing one v ariety. While the banana cannot evolve, the diseases can - Sigatoka may have been initially thwarted by a new type of banana, but new strains have emerged that threaten the Cavendish too. History is repeating itself. At the moment we’re in the fertilizer stage, with an ailing species propped up by massive doses of chemicals. But that won’t last forever. In time the banana as it is on sale today will no longer exist, a victim of industrial monoculture.

That time isn’t far off. In 2003, a report from the New Scientist declared that the banana would not see out another decade. Five years on we’re still planting the Cavendish. In the words of Peter Chapman in his book Jungle Capitalists, the fruit companies “took the fruit out of the jungle and turned a natural product into a commodity, a thing of commerce and the mass market. As a result it appears unequal to the task of survival.”

• The man trying to genetically fix the banana
• Banana drama - Observer article
• Yes, we have no bananas - Celsias report