WORLD BANK FIGURES FOR PHOTO: John Haris way represents the value of the forest in stabiusins te cumate, or as a nabitat Tor flora and fauna, and the home of biodiversity.
Although the price can tell us something about scarcity, that does not always work until if is too late. market signals do not tell us anything about what we throw away.
Signals
The market is not going to send us signals if there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or too many CFCs. The World Bank's finance wing called the International Pinance Corporation is making a large loan to Egypt to build a factory to produce air conditioners and refrigerators with CFCS.
The market is not going to tell us that the ozone layer is only one-third of what it should be. • The logical outcome of leaving the the family income (let alone assets) of the richest 1 per cent is 115 times that of the lowest 10 per cent. On a world scale the disproportion runs into thousands of percentage points. • Relying on the market to do everything makes it impossible to define social or developmental objectives.
Despite all this the World Bank and the IMF are impossally, most emphatically in the third world. In fact the world market is the most brutal of all markets because there are not many rules, while in most states there are at least certain social rules and safety nets, however inadequate.
The World Bank and the IMF found in the third world debt the perfect instrument to force the integration of the indebted countries more and more tightly into the world capitalist economy. They say poor countries must export more, sapposedly to grow their way out of the debt, but the effect is entirely different.
A recent study of African raw materials by the Transnational Institute showed there is absolutely no hope for Africa to overcome its debt throush the export of commodities, because terms of trade are declining, more synthetic substitutes are being used, improved techputsare required, and there is increasing But overwhelmingly the main problem is the net transfer of wealth out of the poor countries into the rich. In 1982 the indebted countries of the South owed the North E365 billion. Ten years later, having paid over £591 billion in debt service, they owed £660 billion.
Doubled
The countries of the South are overall 60 per cent more in debt than they were at the beginning of the 1980s. Africa's debt has doubled. The debt of the poorest nations has more than doubled. In that time the poor nations have paid the equivalent of more than six Marshall Plans to the rich. Every minute £68,000 is paid by the poor to the Western banks Everything that stands in their path is destroyed, says Susan George of the dominant institutions. 'Nature stands in "In the next couple of decades the best case scenario is that 15 per cent of rain forest will be lost. It could be a terrifying two thirds" the way of profits, so nature must be disregarded. Culture stands in the way of market extension because culture usually involves community ties, solidarity, reciprocity. The state is often in the way because it tends to regulate and even sometimes to protect the poor and more vulnerable groups, so the state must be reduced to the lowest common denominator.
The World Bank and the IMF step in £660 billion" to determine for many countries Whether the currency is devalued or to define macro-economic policy or set with the US government). Such was the case when Egypt joined US forces in the Gulf and was immediately awarded a one-quarter reduction in debt, unachieved by any other nation.' The only way out of the debt, poverty and environmental destruction quagmire is planned action on a global scale; but thisaction is thwarted by the existing capitalist global institutions.
A few facts indicate the scale of the • We are within a few years of losing 15-25 per cent of the total of earth's blodiversity, but no one really knows what this really means in terms of the tumber of species lost, because no one as any real idea of the number of speaes In une last uve years more tat 300 new fish species have been identified • Harvard biologists estimate that 50 species are being driven to extinction every day. Other exerts out the figures muc estimate 20,000 species are viped out annually • Probably as many as one fifth threatend, terr in trie u labout terrestrial native plants are considered in short• The scenario for the next couple o decades in the Latin American rain rests ranges for a best case loss of 1 ir cent of total area, to a worst case of terrifying two thirds.
Species have always been lost in the natural process or evolution. But saentists believe that the natural rate is now exceeded by a factor of 40,000.
For 'green revolution' agriculture has forced peasant cultivators to abandon farming with selfreproduced seeds which were the result of thousands of years of natural evolution, and replace them with genetically identical and vulnerable standard Homogenised global thinking and destruction of diversity is nowhere more apparent than in the area of so-called development economics, in which it is considered that all economies must pass hrough the same stages on a predetermined path of economic growth. In this Process there is simply no account of best, there to be tamed or exploited.
The development places like the World Bank are highly skilled in thinking globally and experts t acting locally, forcing people to cor do not just homogenise space, they tele scope time as wel negative implications of homogenised global thinking are also revealed in cultural, intellectual and linguisticpractice through the use of collecive nouns like 'humans' and particularly the term 'we', as in 'we are destroying our forests', a familiar phrase of many bureaucrats, moralists.
We are almost never responsible for these crimes, and using this terminology only makes it harder to see exactiy which people and which institutions are the real perpetrators.
So long as the ideology and practice of the so-called free-market system prevails without being contested, the late or the worta mines in te palance No. 33 5 Dec, 1992
THE FLN is suffering from a process of political disorientation that began long b-fore the electoral defeat in 1990 and has worsened since then. Here VICTOR PRISMA attempts to answer this question, casting a spotlight on the weaknesses of FSLN policy both before and after the electoral defeat. Tensions inside the FSLN have mounted as a result or contaicane social interests which have not been overcome in policies that can appeal to the masses and reorientate the FSLN itself. This has meant that the efforts of social movements to defend their gains against the Chamorro government have been International News