Colonialism: the occupation and territorial exploitation carried out by force by the European powers against peoples considered backward or wild (Encyclopedia Treccani).
To understand where the third stage of the attack (digital neo-colonialism) came from, we can start from 1992, at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. We were still in what I call the age of dreams, convinced as we were that, after the Cold War, the construction of a different, more peaceful and tolerant world had begun. The victory that was being prepared for the democrats led by Bill Clinton was a sign of a change of course, while for us Europeans, the signing of the Maastricht Treaty made us "Europeans" for all intents and purposes (or so we believed) and, further south, a peace agreement put an end to the long civil war in Mozambique.
We forgot, or did not want to see, that all this was only appearance. Yet the invasion of Iraq only dated from the previous year, as did the dissolution of Yugoslavia (1990) and the beginning of the various local wars (Slovenia, 1991; Croatia, 1991-1995; Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995), the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan (1992) and the civil war that continued in Algeria. And so, while in Italy the massacres of Capaci and Via d'Amelio eliminated the judges Falcone and Borsellino, proud antagonists of the mafia power; the year ended with a new American military operation in Somalia.
All this to say that, as often happens, we saw what we wanted to see (or, perhaps, what the dominant media had imposed as the official narrative).
The Earth Summit saw the signing of the Convention on Biodiversity (these were still years when we were talking about biodiversity and not about ecosystem services as I explained in the previous webinar), with 3 declared objectives:
- The conservation of biological diversity
- The sustainable use of its components and
- The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of using these genetic resources, including through fair access to genetic resources and appropriate technology transfer.
The CBD will give an important boost to a process that, born within FAO thanks to the mind and effort of "Pepe" Esquinas, would become the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in 2001.
It would take years for governments to ratify it, but in the meantime, innovative principles came through the front door, stating in particular that the past, present and future contribution of farmers in all regions of the world, particularly those in centres of origin and diversity, to the conservation, improvement and provision of these resources was the basis of farmers' rights.
It will also be thanks to this trail of "rights" that in 2004, after long and difficult negotiations, the Guidelines for the Right to Food were approved. This proposal originated within civil society organizations and was brought to FAO where it was negotiated in a collaborative spirit that was hailed by all as a very innovative method.
Two years later, thanks to the impetus of just two countries, the Philippines and Brazil, and with the full support of FAO's Director-General, the International Conference on Agrarian Reform in Porto Alegre was approved and realized in March 2006. This positive period continued when it seemed possible to make a real impact on international agendas related to natural resources.
Last but not least, it was the 2010 Nagoya Protocol, which had to specify the Access and Benefit Sharing mechanism, which came into force in 2014: the real key point of all previous efforts, because it was going to discuss how to share, concretely, the benefits realized on the natural resources of which the peasant, indigenous, pastoral and fishing communities were the first maintainers and improvers, over which governments claimed their exclusive right to negotiate in international treaties and, on the other hand, the private sector that wanted to access those resources, use them and patent them for their own benefits.
Slide
In short, everything seemed to be going in a more democratic direction, yet I decided to call the decade that began in 2010 the Age of Disillusion, and not only because of the financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States.
The clearest signal was the Rio+20 conference, to "celebrate" 20 years of the Earth Summit. If the first had been a summit of Heads of state and government, with some representations of civil society and the private sector, the 2012 summit was exactly the opposite: more than 2700 representatives of the private sector invaded Rio to lead, from inside and outside, the Summit which showed, in all its evidence, "the corporate capture of the UN by the private sector".
In the concluding statements, Banks, Politicians and Multinationals expressed themselves in the same language about the environment. As I explained in the previous webinar, since 2005 the new "religion" of ecosystem services had been launched, that is, the marketing of the environment. The next step was to certify it at the highest levels: this is what the Rio+20 was for! The mechanism was that of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), whose foundations were laid since the Earth Summit, and which now includes 200 of the world's leading multinationals. Considered one of the most influential forums in the world (which should come as no surprise to anyone), it is considered to be one of the main sources of private sector resistance to any policy aimed at dealing with Climate Change.
The central issue that Rio+20 had to address was the Access and Benefit Sharing mechanism, so that it would have clear rules to enforce worldwide.
The scheme is summarized in this slide:
1. Prior Inform Consent is requested and obtained, resulting in a
2. Permit that is issued and, immediately after,
3. Published in the ABS Clearing House
4. The Clearing House generates an internationally recognized certificate of compliance (IRCC), which includes a unique identifier for tracking.
5. Now, genetic resources can be used
6….
7. Finally, the checkpoint communicates information to the national authorities.
The principle is therefore clear and simple in theory: to access genetic resources you need to ask for and obtain a permit. The point is that genetic resources, in practice, are translated with genetic sequences, i.e. information that can be digitized. This is where the private sector lobby has focused: to consider Digital Sequence Information (DSI) as something different from genetic material, which falls under the CBD. According to them, the CBD refers clearly and only to "genetic material" and not to abstract information. Expanding the CBD to include this specification would require the reopening of global negotiations on the entire Convention.
The practical effects then become obvious: if I take the information sequence of a certain material, and reuse it to recombine it and make other derived products out of it, I do not get under the CBD and therefore do not have to apply ABS.
On the contrary, both the farming communities and the countries that are the repositories of this genetic material wanted the ISD to be included in the CBD, but this is still under discussion. However, hopes are limited.
To be more specific, let us remember that the DSI can be achieved in 3 different ways:
1. The first is through the mechanism indicated above, which translates ABS into practice;
2. The second is through the (ongoing) biopiracy (i.e. going to areas of high biodiversity, scanning the material directly on site - then without taking it away, and then uploading it to parent companies' databases to recombine it. All this without asking anyone anything and without paying anything.
3. The third is to use the gene banks.
The private sector is clearly not interested in the first way (asking permission and having to share the benefits). The second is officially outlawed, although it is a growing problem ... so it remains the third way ...
The global strategy, which we are beginning to understand, starts with what has been called the Food Action Alliance. Basically the new narrative, after convincing us that natural resources management had to be done through the market (remember the previous webinar? ), took a second step to clarify how fundamental is the role of the private sector (not the small companies, but the large Corporations) (Rio+20 served this purpose) and the third was to promote the global alliance between this private sector and the United Nations (whose political agendas had already been largely influenced for several years in favor of these Corporations - last but not least, the well-known Voluntary Guidelines for Good Governance of the Earth in 2012).
This new step forward has been promoted by the Davos Forum which has taken on the burden (and the honor) of promoting this FAA, to which some Big NGOs (the BINGOs) have been associated, all with a 3-point lobbying agenda:
- Promoting a World Food Systems Summit (WFS) (and to do so they waited for the moment of the transition between the former Director-General of FAO, Brazilian Graziano and the new, Chinese: in this interregnum they were able to manoeuvre for the WFFS to be held in New York and not in Rome, at FAO, as would have been logical, thus also reducing the possible Chinese influence; the aim of this WFFS, originally planned for next year, is to record a greater change in the multilateral system of the United Nations, privileging the relationship with the private sector (that of the WBCSD in fact) to the detriment of legitimate governments.
- The second axis of work concerns the reform of the Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR) system so as to take control of it (with substantial and targeted subsidies). The key issue here is that the CGIAR controls the gene banks I was talking about earlier about the DSI... get the trick?
- Last but not least, taking control of Big Data through the creation of an International Council for Digital (to manage the huge mass of digital DNA and DSI data).
In summary:
The Summit provides the framework,
CGIAR the delivery system and the
BIG DATA the final product.
A concrete application concerns the fight against malaria, carried out by the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation that would like at all costs to find a pharmaceutical solution to the problem. Too bad that there is probably one, natural, and that this is the grain of sand that Big Pharma (with its ramifications up to the United Nations) wants to eliminate so as not to block its designs.
For 2000 years a plant, Artemisia annua, has been cultivated in China, which has proved to have extremely positive effects in the fight against malaria. Widely used by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, it started to be cultivated in Africa, together with its local variety, Artemisia afra, an endemic, indigenous plant known by the indigenous peoples. All this did not please the pharmaceutical giants who for decades have decided that the fight against malaria should be done through synthetic products from their laboratories.
Bill Gates with his intention to find a vaccine within a generation. Synthetic products were searched for in Artemisia annua, isolating one component, then patented. A series of specific treatments, called ACT, the tests made using the Artemisia plant, both the annual and the afra, to make infusions, are giving much more positive results, without secondary effects and, above all, it can be directly produced by all farmers because they only need to keep a few plants close to home to make preventive infusion treatments.
At an international level, the pressure on the WHO has led the latter to declare that Artemisia is not recommended for the fight against malaria, thus confirming who really co-manages in this agency.
Final considerations:
Vandana Shiva reminds us that the Israeli company Evogene has patented a computer program for reading the plant genome, signing an agreement with Monsanto granting it exclusive rights on a whole series of genes identified by them. A similar work on digital mapping of the genetic heritage of traditional seeds is being done by another companỳ, DivSeek and they are certainly not the only companies in this promising market. A parallel path, but aiming at the same goal, has been undertaken by Syngenta to sell access to sequenced genetic data of traditional seeds coming from international gene banks (whose control is one of the objectives of the new colonization).
Slide
Passing through digital DNA means skipping everything about rights and benefit sharing, which will thus remain only in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry. This is why digital DNA control becomes the key to the future, both for those who want to fight biopiracy and for those who want to exploit even more the potentialities offered by recombinations and modifications (drugs but also GMOs).
Now the Covid, and then what?
- outbreaks of the virus, the origin of which has been localized in various species of bats, are more frequent in areas of central and western Africa that have recently undergone deforestation processes. FAO, for its part, had already reported this link in 2006, with an article published in the magazine Unasylva
- The risk of disease outbreaks is not only increased by the loss of habitats, but also by the way they are replaced. In order to meet a growing demand for meat, an area equivalent to that of the African continent has been deforested to raise animals for slaughter. Some of these are then illegally marketed or sold on live animal markets. There, species that would probably never have crossed paths in the wild are kept caged side by side and microbes can easily move from one to the other. This type of development, which has already produced the Sars Coronavirus in the early 2000s, could be at the origin of the current Covid-19.
Recalling Laudato Sì
Given the scale of change, it is no longer possible to find a specific, discrete answer for each part of the problem. It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions within natural systems themselves and with social systems. We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental
As my friend Pepe Esquinas says:
”for someone who thinks s/he's too small to make an impact, maybe s/he's never slept with a mosquito in the room”
Colonialismo: l'occupazione e lo sfruttamento territoriale realizzati con la forza dalle potenze europee ai danni di popoli ritenuti arretrati o selvaggi (Enciclopedia Treccani).
Per capire da dove venga il terzo stadio dell’attacco (il neo-colonialismo digitale) possiamo iniziare dal 1992, al momento della realizzazione del Summit della Terra a Rio de Janeiro. Eravamo ancora in quella che chiamo l’era dei sogni, convinti come eravamo che, finita la guerra fredda, fosse iniziata la costruzione di un mondo diverso, più pacifico e tollerante. La vittoria che si preparava per i democratici guidati da Bill Clinton era un segnale di cambiamento di rotta, mentre per noi europei, la firma del trattato di Maastricht ci faceva diventare “europei” a tutti gli effetti (o almeno così credevamo) e, più a Sud, un accordo di pace metteva fine alla lunga guerra civile in Mozambico.
Dimenticavamo, o non volevamo vedere, che tutto questo era solo apparenza. Eppure l’invasione dell’Iraq datava solo dell’anno precedente, così come la dissoluzione della Jugoslavia (1990) e l’inizio delle varie guerre locali (Slovenia, 1991; Croazia, 1991-1995; Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995), la guerra tra Armenia e Azerbaigian (1992) e la guerra civile che continuava in Algeria. E così, mentre in Italia le stragi di Capaci e di Via d’Amelio eliminano i giudici Falcone e Borsellino, fieri antagonisti del potere mafioso; l’anno si chiude con una nuova operazione militare americana in Somalia.
Tutto questo per dire che, come spesso accade, vedevamo quello che volevamo vedere (o, forse, quello che i media dominanti avevano imposto come la narrativa ufficiale).
Il Summit della Terra vide la firma della Convenzione sulla Biodiversità (erano ancora anni in cui si parlava di biodiversità e non di servizi ecosistemici come vi spiegavo nel webinar precedente), con 3 obbiettivi dichiarati:
- La conservazione della diversità biologica
- L’uso sostenibile dei suoi componenti e
- La giusta ed equa divisione dei benefici dell'utilizzo di queste risorse genetiche, compreso attraverso un giusto accesso alle risorse genetiche ed attraverso un appropriato trasferimento delle tecnologie necessarie.
La CBD darà una spinta importante a un processo che, nato internamente alla FAO grazie alla mente e allo sforzo di “Pepe” Esquinas, sarebbe diventato, nel 2001, il Trattato Internazionale sulle Risorse Fitogenetiche per l’Alimentazione e l’Agricultura.
Ci sarebbero voluti anni per farlo ratificare dai vari governi, ma intanto alcuni principi innovativi fecero il loro ingresso dalla porta principale, affermando in particolare che il contributo passato, presente e futuro degli agricoltori di tutte le regioni del mondo, in particolare di quelli dei centri di origine e di diversità, alla conservazione, al miglioramento e alla messa a disposizione di queste risorse, è alla base dei diritti degli agricoltori.
Sarà anche grazia a questa scia di “diritti” che nel 2004, dopo lunghe e difficoltose negoziazioni, vennero approvate le Linee Guida per il Diritto all’Alimentazione. Si trattava di una proposta, originatasi nel seno delle organizzazioni della società civile, portate alla FAO ove furono negoziate in uno spirito collaborativo che venne salutato da tutti come un metodo molto innovativo.
Due anni dopo, grazie alla spinta di due soli paesi, Filippine e Brasile, e con il pieno appoggio del Direttore Generale della FAO, venne approvata e poi realizzata la Conferenza Internazionale sulla Riforma Agraria a Porto Alegre, nel marzo del 2006. Continuava così questo periodo positivo quando sembrava fosse possibile incidere realmente nelle agende internazionali legate alle risorse naturali.
Ultimo, ma non meno importante, fu il protocollo di Nagoya del 2010 che doveva specificare meglio il meccanismo dell’Access and Benefit Sharing, entrato in vigore nel 2014: il vero punto chiave di tutti gli sforzi precedenti, perché si andava a discutere di come suddividere, concretamente, i benefici realizzati sulle risorse naturali di cui le comunità contadine, indigene, pastorili e della pesca erano i primi mantenitori e miglioratori, sopra i quali i governi rivendicavano il loro diritto esclusivo di negoziare nei trattati internazionali e, dall’altra parte, quel settore privato che voleva accedere a quelle risorse, usarle e patentarle per i propri benefici.
Insomma, tutto sembrava andare in una direzione più democratica, eppure ho deciso di chiamare il decennio iniziato nel 2010 come l’era delle disillusioni, e non solo per la crisi finanziaria iniziata nel 2007 negli Stati Uniti.
Il segnale più evidente fu la conferenza di Rio+20, per “celebrare” i 20 anni del Summit sulla Terra. Se il primo era stato un summit di capi di stato e di governo, con alcune rappresentazioni della società civile e del settore privato, quello del 2012 fu esattamente il contrario: più di 2700 rappresentanti del settore privato invasero Rio per guidare, da dentro e da fuori, il Summit che mostrò, in tutta la sua evidenza, “the corporate capture of the UN by the private sector”.
Nelle dichiarazioni conclusive, Banche, Politici e Multinazionali si esprimevano con lo stesso linguaggio riguardo all’ambiente. Come avevo spiegato nel webinar precedente, fin dal 2005 era stata lanciata la nuova “religione” dei servizi ecosistemici, cioè la messa sul mercato dell’ambiente. Il passo successivo era stato quello di certificarlo ai più alti livelli: a questo servì la Rio+20! Il meccanismo fu quello del World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), le cui basi furono poste fin dal Summit sulla Terra, e che oramai raggruppa 200 fra le principali multinazionali mondiali. Considerato come uno dei forum più influenti a livello mondiale (il che non dovrebbe sorprendere nessuno), è considerato come uno dei principali responsabili delle resistenze del settore privato a qualsiasi politica diretta ad occuparsi del Climate Change.
Il problema centrale di cui doveva occuparsi la Rio+20 era quello del meccanismo di Access and Benefit Sharing, in modo da avere regole chiare da far applicare a livello mondiale.
Lo schema è riassunto in questa slide:
1. Prior Inform Consent is requested and obtained, resulting in a
2. Permit that is issued and, immediately after,
3. Published in the ABS Clearing House
4. The Clearing House generates an internationally recognized certificate of compliance (IRCC), which includes a unique identifier for tracking.
5. Now, genetic resources can be used
6….
7. Finally, the checkpoint communicates information to the national authorities.
Il principio quindi è chiaro e semplice in teoria: per accedere alle risorse genetiche bisogna chiedere ed ottenere un permesso. Il punto è che le risorse genetiche, in pratica si traducono con delle sequenze genetiche, cioè di informazioni che possono essere digitalizzate. Ecco quindi dove si è concentrate la lobby del settore private: considerare la Digital Sequence Information (DSI) come una cosa diversa dal materiale genetico, che ricade sotto la CBD. Secondo loro, la CBD si riferisce chiaramente e solamente al “materiale genetico” e non alle informazioni astratte. Espandere la CBD per includere anche questa specifica, necessiterebbe la riapertura di negoziazioni globali sull’intera Convenzione.
Gli effetti pratici diventano quindi evidenti: se io prendo la sequenza di informazione di un certo materiale, e la riutilizzo per ricombinarla e farne altri prodotti derivati, non ricado sotto la CBD e quindi non devo applicare l’ABS.
Al contrario, tanto le comunità contadine come i paesi depositari di questo materiale genetico volevano che la DSI fosse inclusa nella CBD, ma su questo si sta ancora discutendo. Le speranze sono però limitate.
Per essere più specifici, ricordiamo che il DSI può essere ottenuto in 3 modi diversi:
1. Il primo è quello attraverso il meccanismo indicato precedentemente, che traduce l’ABS in pratica;
2. Il secondo è quello (in corso) della biopirateria (cioè andare nelle zone ad alta biodiversità, scannerizzare il materiale direttamente sul posto – quindi senza portarlo via, e poi farne un upload su base dati delle case madri per ricombinarlo. Il tutto senza chiedere niente a nessuno e senza pagare nulla.
3. Il terzo è quello di usare le banche del gene.
Il settore privato chiaramente non è interessato alla prima strada (chiedere permessi e dover condividere I benefici). Il secondo ufficialmente è fuorilegge, anche se rappresenta un problema crescente … quindi resta la terza via …
La strategia globale, che stiamo cominciando a capire, parte da quella che è stata chiamata la Food Action Alliance. In pratica la nuova narrativa, dopo averci convinti che la gestione delle risorse naturali andava fatta attraverso il mercato (ricordate il webinar precedente?), ha fatto un secondo passo per chiarire quanto sia fondamentale il ruolo del settore privato (non le piccole aziende, ma le grandi Corporations) (a questo è servito Rio+20) e il terzo era di promuovere la alleanza mondiale fra questo settore privato e le Nazioni Unite (le cui agende politiche erano già state largamente influenzate da parecchi anni in favore di queste Corporations – ultima, ma non meno importante, le conosciute Direttive Volontarie per la Buona Governanza della Terra nel 2012).
Questo nuovo passo avanti è stato promosso dal Forum di Davos che si è assunto l’onere (e l’onore) di promuovere questa FAA, a cui sono state associate alcune Big NGOs (le BINGOs), il tutto con una agenda di lobbying in 3 punti:
- Promuovere un Summit Mondiale sui Sistemi Alimentari (World Food Systems Summit) (e per farlo hanno atteso il momento del passaggio tra l’ex-Direttore generale della FAO, il brasiliano Graziano e il nuovo, cinese: in questo interregno hanno potuto manovrare perché il WFFS fosse realizzato a New York e non a Roma, presso la FAO, come sarebbe stato logico, in questo modo riducendo anche la possibile influenza cinese); lo scopo di questo WFFS, originalmente previsto per l’anno prossimo, è di registrare un cambio maggiore nel sistema multilaterale delle Nazioni Unite, privilegiando il rapporto con il settore privato (quello del WBCSD di fatto) a scapito dei governi legittimi.
- Il secondo asse di lavoro riguarda la riforma del sistema dei Centri di Ricerca Agricola (CGIAR) in modo da prenderne il controllo (con sovvenzioni ingenti e mirate). La questione chiave qui è che il CGIAR controlla le banche del gene di cui parlavo prima a proposito del DSI… capito il trucco?
- Ultimo, ma già in atto da tempo, prendere il controllo dei Big Data attraverso la creazione di un Consiglio Internazionale per il Digitale (per gestire l’enorme massa di dati relativi al DNA digitale e al DSI).
In sintesi:
Il Summit costituisce il quadro di riferimento,
CGIAR il sistema di delivery e i
BIG DATA il prodotto finale.
Un’applicazione concreta riguarda la famosa lotta alla malaria, portata avanti dalla Fondazione di Bill e Melina Gates che vorrebbe a tutti i costi trovare una soluzione farmaceutica al problema. Peccato che ne esista probabilmente una, naturale, e che questa costituisca il granellino di sabbia che Big Pharma (con le sue ramificazioni fin dentro alle Nazioni Unite) vuole eliminare per non bloccare i suoi disegni.
• Da 2000 anni si coltiva in Cina una pianta, la Artemisia annua, che si è dimostrata avere effetti estremamente positivi nella lotta alla malaria. Ampiamente utilizzata dai Vietcong durante la guerra del Vietnam, ha iniziato ad essere coltivata in Africa, assieme alla sua varietà̀ locale Artemisia afra, pianta endemica, autoctona e conosciuta dalle popolazioni indigene. Tutto questo non è piaciuto ai giganti farmaceutici che da decenni hanno deciso che la lotta alla malaria vada fatta attraverso prodotti di sintesi dei loro laboratori.
• Bill Gates con il suo proposito di trovare un vaccino nel giro di una generazione. I prodotti di sintesi sono stati cercati nell’Artemisia annua, isolandone un componente, poi brevettato. Una serie di trattamenti specifici, detti ACT,
• le prove fatte usando la pianta dell’Artemisia, sia la annua che la afra, per farne delle infusioni, stanno dando dei risultati molto più̀ positivi, senza effetti secondari e soprattutto può̀ essere prodotta direttamente da tutti i contadini perché́ gli basterebbe tenere qualche pianta vicino casa per farne dei trattamenti preventivi in infusione.
• A livello internazionale, le pressioni fatte sulla OMS hanno portato quest’ultima a dichiarare che l’Artemisia non è raccomandabile per la lotta alla malaria, così confermando chi co-manda davvero in questa agenzia
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Considerazioni finali:
Vandana Shiva ci ricorda che la società̀ israeliana Evogene ha brevettato un programma informatico per la lettura del genoma delle piante, firmando un accordo con Monsanto concedendogli i diritti esclusivi su tutta una serie di geni da loro identificati. Un lavoro simile sulla mappatura digitale del patrimonio genetico delle sementi tradizionali lo sta facendo un’altra società̀, DivSeek e sicuramente non sono le sole aziende in questo promettente mercato. Una strada parallela, ma che mira allo stesso obiettivo, è stata intrapresa da Syngenta per vendere l’accesso ai dati genetici sequenziati delle sementi tradizionali provenienti dalle banche dei geni internazionali (il cui controllo è uno degli obiettivi della nuova colonizzazione). Passando attraverso il DNA digitale si salta quindi tutto quanto riguarda diritti e condivisione dei benefici che resteranno così solo nelle mani dell’industria farmaceutica. Ecco perché́ il controllo del DNA digitale diventa la chiave del futuro, sia per chi vuol combattere la bio-pirateria, sia per chi voglia sfruttare ancor di più̀ le potenzialità̀ offerte dalle ricombinazioni e modificazioni (farmaci ma anche OGM)
Adesso il Covid, e poi?
• i focolai del virus, la cui origine è stata localizzata in varie specie di pipistrelli, sono più̀ frequenti nelle zone dell’Africa centrale e occidentale che hanno recentemente subito processi di deforestazione. La FAO da parte sua aveva già̀ segnalato questo legame nel 2006, con un articolo apparso nella rivista Unasylva
• Il rischio di insorgenza di malattie non aumenta solo per la perdita degli habitat, ma anche per il modo in cui questi vengono rimpiazzati. Con lo scopo di soddisfare una domanda crescente di carne è stata disboscata una superficie equivalente a quella del continente africano per allevare animali da destinare al macello. Alcuni di questi vengono poi commercializzati illegalmente o venduti sui mercati degli animali vivi. Lì, delle specie che probabilmente in natura non si sarebbero mai incrociate vengono tenute in gabbia fianco a fianco e i microbi possono tranquillamente spostarsi da una all’altra. Questo tipo di sviluppo, che ha già̀ prodotto il Coronavirus della Sars nei primi anni 2000, potrebbe essere all’origine del Covid-19 attuale.
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Selling Nature by the Dollar - Webinar 2 summary:
The second session was dedicated to the environmental issue. Using the analogy of space launches, the first stage of the attack concerned more directly the agricultural producers (webinar 1), almost disappeared from the face of the earth, turning them into "mass workers" (in the sense that historically Tronti and Negri have given them talking about the industrial sector) leaving few niches of peasants who still resist but do not affect the world dynamics. But it will be on these niches that we will lean in the final conclusions...
The second stage is the environmental one, and even this time the origins date back to the end of World War II, when the profit rate began to fall, thus forcing capital holders (for the moment still physical capital) to look for new ways to make profits, the real key to analyze and understand what is happening in the world.
So here we are in 1971 and the turning point impressed by the Americans. The Nixon administration is put under pressure and decides to announce the end of the system called "Gold Standard", the parity between gold and dollar (and associated currencies). From that moment on, every currency will have to sail on the open sea without defenses other than those of the strength of the country represented. Needless to say, the dollar, the currency of the economically dominant country, as well as reserve currency for international trade and printed at will by the American Federal Bank, would have had a considerable advantage over all the others.
This decision opened up the front for monetary speculation, which would bring considerable profits. In addition, the following year (1972), a new market was opened on the Chicago Stock Exchange, that of "futures" (modern derivatives), which allowed speculation not only on currencies but also on commodities.
The following year, 1973, the main Arab oil-producing countries decided to break the bond of submission that bound them to the American "seven sisters" in the oil sector, used to force oil-producers to accept very low prices for black gold. What was defined as the first oil "shock" was actually a fair realignment of prices, which the Western narrative obviously presented as a sign of Arab greed. A massive transfer of capital was therefore made in favor of the Arabs, but they had no clear strategies on what to do with this mountain of money.
As already mentioned in the previous session, it was during this period that the debt industry was invented. With the support of the large financial institutions, the countries of the South were forced to accept proposals for mega-projects that would be financed with this capital. Written quickly and badly, almost none of these projects were successful for the local populations and the results were: a rampant corruption among the rulers and enormous debts for the countries. This would have been the fundamental justification for the subsequent structural adjustment programmes (SAP) we talked about earlier.
However, this new world in preparation, based on the "free" market for speculation, needed strong political cover and this came in 1980. Carter's Democratic America was swept away by Reagan populism, while Margaret Thatcher took the place of the labourists at the head of England. Thus began the neoliberal domination, whose preparation had begun years earlier in American university and political circles (just think of the policy imposed by the Chicago boys on Pinochet's Chile after the 1973 coup d'état). It was a mix of individualism and the absence of rules, where government and public policies were seen as part of the problems and never as solutions. One recalls the celebrated phrase attributed to M. Thatcher that "there is no society, only individuals".
From then on, pervasively and occupying all areas of daily life, from economics to culture, education and health, the new creed would begin its long and still unfinished journey.
As far as environmental issues were concerned, the change was generated primarily in the USA: thousands of employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were laid off and a number of environmental protection laws were repealed. Reagan's successor, Bush Sr., who had been his vice-president, continued along this path and during his term of office the famous "No Net Loss Policy" and the creation of the first Wetlands Mitigation Bank were approved. In this way an operator (financial, industrial) who wanted to "develop" a wetland (i.e. a particular and fragile ecosystem), had to buy "compensation" shares from these WMB to obtain government permits. The money collected in this way would have been used to protect endangered species (we will come back to this later).
The successive democratic administrations maintained this policy, and it should also be remembered that it was during the first Clinton presidency that the Kyoto agreement was signed, which brought the logic of environmental compensation to the whole world. Being able to speculate and/or destroy natural resources in the South of the world thus became a policy approved by the United Nations, in exchange for "compensation" to be acquired in the North. After Clinton came Bush Jr. who expanded these policies to cover other areas (Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act). The reduction in EPA staff continued, and new permits to drill in Alaska (other protected areas) were given to oil tankers (of which the Bush family was part).
In the meantime, the Soviet Union had disappeared, replaced by a weak and submissive Russia subjected to the raids of financial bandits of all kinds, thus leaving the field open to the only remaining power, the American power and its New Economic Order.
The new millennium arrived quickly: for many the starting date was September 11, 2001, with the fall of the Twin Towers in New York. I think it would be interesting to consider 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans: the damage was enormous, highlighting the bad territorial defense policies carried out by the city administrations, all to the disadvantage of poor (black) citizens. The estimated insured damage was $75 billion, but if they included uninsured assets, the figure doubled: $150 billion, a stellar figure that no public administration could ever put together. The world of insurance and finance sensed that this was the opening for new and fruitful speculation.
New, increasingly complex financial instruments (options, swaps, CDS and Catastrophe Bonds, to name but a few categories) became common currency. Fundraising increased exponentially, thanks to promises of very advantageous interest rates, although the risks incurred were very large and above all very difficult to assess, even for the same institutions that issued them. The placement of these huge amounts of capital was not difficult since, as imposed by neoliberal theories, governments had to lower taxes to favour economically productive sectors and attract foreign investment. This meant that the debts of countries (even those of the North, as shown in the graph below for Italy) increased rapidly and steadily and that governments - whatever the political color - no longer had the resources for the policies they wanted to implement. Hence the need to go to the financial market to finance themselves.
As we can see from the figure below, the world economy accelerated its movement towards the financial world. More and more resources were diverted from the real economy to enter the world of highly volatile and precarious financial speculation. Capitals in search of immediate profit, at the expense of any qualms, moral, ethical, environmental or other.
In order for this "New Economic Order" to work at its best, it was also necessary to upgrade to a higher scale of the playing field. Just as the creation of the Nation-State at the end of the 19th century had been functional to the new mercantile economic system that was being prepared (homogeneous and larger market spaces than the limited regional or sub-regional markets that existed at the time), it now became necessary to further increase these homogeneous spaces beyond the narrow national dimensions. Here then was the great work to create supra-national entities (such as the European Union) or economic treaties that linked entire regions of the world (such as Nafta, Mercosur, ...). The dominant economic system (which had already subjected the social construction of the Nation-State to its needs) by now went beyond the national restrictions: we are beginning to talk about globalization, that is, the replacement of the national-state dimension with superior entities which all suffer from the same structural problem: lack of participation and submission of individuals and social groups to the dominant economic (and financial) power. The same process will be carried out with the previous political classes, which are gradually being replaced by new elites (formed in the new neoliberal creed), up to the entities without body or soul which no longer respond to democratic institutions but become self-referential (like the GAFA) and can afford to impose their policies on the various subjugated governments.
It is this mix of liberal orientation, with players of immense power, without controls and with the sole objective of making money and now, that leads to the crisis of 2007-2008. In the midst of this speculative Far-West, natural resources became an even greedier opportunity to do business. This is when, in 2005, the new religion of Ecosystem Services was launched. The group of experts in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published that year, would have taken care of it. The basic logic was always the same, namely to make it possible to speculate (i.e. make money) on these limited resources: Nature must be managed through Ecosystem Services. So, first the problem is created, that is speculating and destroying natural resources, land, water, forests, and then medicine is invented to this evil: natural resources are not defended because people have no idea of their value (i.e. of their price), this will be the line followed since then until today, by the convinced neoliberals and naive experts who put their signature on policies whose result was evident from the beginning. Private capital needed new areas in which to invest to make money in the short term. To believe that environmental protection was a serious concern is to believe in fairy tales or, as often happens, to be conniving.
And in fact, in parallel with the development of this new religion, which will find subsidies for all those university, political and cultural centres that support it, and which still enjoys the support of many governments and United Nations agencies, we see a drift towards new levels of corruption at the level of the government institutions of the countries concerned. The cuts in education, imposed by the SAPs in the 1980s, are having the desired effect: a new class of unprepared, semi-illiterate officials are taking the reins of local government, while at the centre a few specialists, trained in the universities of the neoliberal creed of the North, ensure that the desired recipes are carried out. At the highest levels of politics, bribes serve to oil the system.
The intellectual battle, which is played out in universities and United Nations agencies, and which normal people have not understood, concerns the semantic change from the concept of "biodiversity" to that of "ecosystem service". While the basic concept of biodiversity was respect for life in all its diversity, with the new lexicon a small, but fundamental, change is introduced: respect for life according to its usefulness for the human being. In concrete terms this means moving from a logic of management as a common good to one that is the monetarisation of Nature.
Here then the real concept becomes evident: the "ecosystem services" that interest us are those that serve us humans, and to these we must give a price: the new publicity will begin to invade us with this new terminology: Payment for Ecosystem Services. Remembering that price is a relationship of exchange between two goods, we introduce the market as a premise to save nature; that same asymmetrical market where the powerful command and the weak obey. Nature, having no rights and no legal representative to defend it, becomes therefore the weakest among the weak. Here then opens up a world to the most unbridled speculation.
A basic philosophical element of the vision based on biodiversity was the necessary humility that we humans must have with respect to the complexity of ecosystems that existed before, during and after the arrival of the human race on this Earth. Too complex to understand everything in every detail; a vision that obviously does not appeal to the financial neoliberal world that now lives only on mathematics and algorithms. As a result, Nature is broken down and, within an ecosystem, the role of a single plant or animal is simulated to understand how important they are. By confusing reality and fantasy, the new compensation banks (created at the time of Bush Sr.) now become Species Banks. Those who want to do business in fragile ecosystems, mining or other, just have to go to these banks and buy shares dedicated to certain plants or animals, with which to "compensate" the negative effects of their work elsewhere. These funds will then be invested to protect element X of a real ecosystem, without knowing what will happen in real life and not in the model. But in this way the higher philosophical goal has been achieved: not only to make money, and immediately, but to declare the superiority of the human being over Nature.
We, the last species to have appeared on Earth, stand "dominus" of everything, in the name of the God Market and his son Profit.
The philosophy of Laudato Sì could not be further from this principle. By preaching the humility of man and the search for balance with natural resources, those who fight in his name immediately become an enemy to be destroyed, and it is good that you young people are aware of this.
The next evolution could be the emission of what I call the Indio-Bonds: in the name of the protection of forests and their function as CO2 absorbers (whose market has been created, even if it still works badly), the local indigenous peoples are removed, to prevent them from creating "negative externalities", thus leaving the forest area (whose CO2 rights have already been sold to the market) under the protection of armed guards who prevent the entry of those who have always lived there. At this point the indigenous population finds itself in danger, forced as it is in smaller areas and without the biodiversity to which they were accustomed. The solution becomes that of preparing a financial product (a derivative or other) to "save" these Indians. Here then the investor can buy shares on the CO2 market (to save the world, even if it destroys the habitat of local populations) and then also buy Indio-Bond to save those same populations that he also contributed to endanger. With all these "positive" actions he can compensate for any other destruction he wants to do in the South or North of the world.
