Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
There are certain glorious moments that define our common humanity. Such moments demonstrate vividly that despite our different colours, social backgrounds and geographical location, we can meld our disparate spirits together and fight for the survival of our beautiful planet.
One such defining moment occurred in 1984/1985 when Bob Geldorf, on seeing the BBC film of the drought and starvation in Ethiopia, used the media to organise Band Aid and later, Live Aid.
Geldorf couldn’t save every starving Ethiopian. But he did speak out, in very angry language, about what should be done. He then mobilised the pop star world into saving as many people as possible. To be able to reach such a self-obsessed group with the plight of a peasant community in the remote hills of “Abyssinia” was a miracle. Yet it happened.
The “Battle of Seattle” has been another defining moment in the history of our planet. The trade ministers of the rich countries went to the meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to put the finishing touches to their stitching up of the rest of the world. They’ve used their rich corporate lawyers to invent an “international commercial law” that promotes the special interests of the rich nations.
It is up to the rest of the world – those who cannot hire rich corporate lawyers – to pick holes in the small print. But this is not easy, for it has been bequeathed to us by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt).
General what? General agreement! Forget the fact that when you became an independent country, you were told to sign Gatt or lose the “advantages” you had been hitherto deriving from it.
So, Gatt, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Uruguay Round: the poor nations have talked and talked and talked. Yet the fact remains that when the Bank of England decides to unload, for profit, the enormous quantities of gold it had bought from South Africa and Ghana – for the princely sum of $32 an ounce, which reigned in the world markets until the 1970s – Ghana and South Africa can do f-all about it. Except close mines or lay off labour. They can do whatever they like with the gold because they have legally bought it, and oh, they are so sorry if they bankrupt us when they put it on the market, but you see, this is a high policy matter decided after great heart- searching and after, of course, taking expert advice from the corporate lawyers!
This principle of heads they win, tails we lose is what the people (engagingly called a “rabble” by CNN’s affiliate station, KIRO) being pelted with tear gas and rubber bullets in Seattle, are fighting against.
What is most moving about them is that most of them are well-fed, middle-class people who could well forget about the planet and not lose a moment of sleep.
But they have chosen to recognise that it is evil to use legal gibberish to patent plants and human beings for profit; to pollute the atmosphere and cause further global warming; and to perpetuate a system whereby a tiny fraction of mankind in North America and Europe consumes more of the earth’s resources – at prices determined by themselves alone – than the rest of humanity put together.
Even as these brave protesters were facing the tear gas canisters of the Seattle police, Reuters was reporting as follows:
“Ivory Coast cocoa farmers have been halting shipments to ports for a week, and started burning beans at the weekend in a protest over low world prices. Ivorian government daily Fraternit Matin said Tuesday Ivorian farmers had burnt around 20 000 tonnes of beans at the weekend.”
Anyone who knows something about how cocoa is produced will cry in his or her heart on reading the above. For this is what cocoa production entails: first, you plant the trees, using undried seeds. These seeds are encased in quite large pods, so they are heavy to carry about. After you’ve planted the seeds, you have to protect the seedlings from squirrels and other pests.
Next, you have to weed the farm, maybe thrice a year. You must continue doing this, even though they won’t yield any harvests for almost 10 years. The trees grow quite tall, so when the harvest does arrive, cutting the pods down is difficult. Then you break the pods open, and take out the seeds one by one. You ferment them in banana or plantain leaves, take them out to dry after three days, and leave them in the sun for at least 10 days, making sure the rain never gets to them.
And to burn the result of all this work?
But worse is to come: cocoa takes a lot of fertile land that could otherwise have been used for planting the things that we eat ourselves.
Instead, we export (cheap) dried cocoa beans, mostly raw, to Europe and America, to produce (expensive) chocolates.
Even so, they reduce our farmers to the point of wishing to burn their cocoa! Why are they burning it? Because the price of cocoa on the world market today is about one-fifth of what was being paid in the mid-1970s!
Mind you, this is not the first time cocoa is being burnt in West Africa. My grandfathers burnt theirs in the late 1920s and early Thirties. For the same reason. But the rich world learnt nothing from that.
And unless we have more people like the Seattle warriors bringing it home to the rulers of the rich world that, if their civil servants would not accept today a salary that was one-fifth of what was being paid to them 25 years ago, then there is no reason why the cocoa farmer should be forced to accept such a payment, the 21st century will also come and go and our offspring will still be chafing over the inequities of world trade as canonised by the WTO.