Ninety-Nine magazine - September 2019

Challenging the power of the

Issue 15 - September 2019

The Growth Problem Why climate justice means unmaking corporate power

Also in this issue Realities of a US-UK trade deal Mining and corporate courts in Armenia In pictures: Global climate justice activism

ISSUE 15: September 2019 03 Campaign news 06 Global news 08 Corporate courts in Armenia 10 No trade deal with Trump 13 Going beyond growth?

14 Supporter page 16 In pictures: the global climate justice movement 18 Super-exploitation in Africa 19 Reviews

Corporate power is now an existential threat Dorothy Guerrero Head of policy In her book Shadow Sovereigns, Susan George writes of multinational corporations: “It’s not just their size, their enormous wealth and their assets that makes the corporations dangerous to democracy. It is also their concentration and cohesion, their co-operation and capacity to influence, infiltrate and in some areas virtually replace governments.”

The rise of the economic and political power of corporations has been the incremental result of years of governments’ decisions to protect corporate interests and privileges, not least through free trade and investment agreements, while shrinking their own function as defender of public interests and the health of the planet.

There are now more than 3400 policies and laws at an international level that support the interests of transnational corporations, while not one which can compel them to behave responsibly or recognise the supremacy of human rights over free trade deals. One of their most effective weapons in recent years has been Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), or ‘corporate courts’, which is why we’ve been tackling this head on.

Ninety-Nine is published three times a year by Global Justice Now Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few.

We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to the rule of the 1%. Our activists and groups in towns and cities around the UK work in solidarity with those at the sharp end of poverty and injustice.

Ninety-Nine magazine, Global Justice Now 66 Offley Road, London SW9 0LS 020 7820 4900 • offleyroad@globaljustice.org.uk • globaljustice.org.uk Editor: James O’Nions Graphic Design: Matt Bonner www.revoltdesign.org Cover illustration: Cressida Knapp Printed on 100% recycled paper.

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In the last few months we’ve been really The pivotal role pleased to work with Armenian campaigners of corporations in fighting to save Amulsar driving climate from the destruction of gold mining and breakdown needs to now threatened with be at the centre of our an ISDS case by the company – see their understanding article on page 8 for more. However, while suing developing country governments for huge amounts of money is now a big investment game for corporations operating in the global south, Nick Dearden (page 10) warns that we may suffer the same injustice if we let the ultra-free-marketeers in the new cabinet of Boris Johnson have their way.

And as the world increasingly wakes up to the injustice of climate breakdown, the pivotal role of corporations in driving it and preventing effective countermeasures needs to be at the centre of our understanding.

In fact, James O’Nions (page 12) argues that we need to go even further, and break with the corporate-led growth which is frying our planet.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a major push to put corporations at the centre of political and government processes, including the United Nations’ climate and environmental institutions. But we must remember that the excessive powers now enjoyed by corporations is still not absolute. Taking back that power will be key to dealing with the climate crisis and a good deal else.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

Exposing the government’s secret trade agenda This autumn we are taking the Department for International Trade to court to force the UK government to end its secrecy around post-Brexit trade deals. Since the 2016 Brexit vote, the government has set up ‘working groups’ with foreign governments to discuss future trade deals. Trade officials have been meeting with the US Trump administration, representatives of the Saudi Arabian dictatorship and many more. But all these meetings have taken place behind closed doors.

We have requested information about these meetings under freedom

of information rules to find out what has been discussed and who has attended, but the trade department refused to give any answers. When it was finally forced to release some documents, they were almost entirely blacked out. We’re now taking the government to court to demand that the details of these secret trade talks are made public – thanks in part to the fantastic response we got to an online crowdfunder we launched to help fund the legal costs.

The trade deals being planned in these secret working groups could rewrite the rules of our economy: locking in privatisation in the NHS, blocking action on climate change, slashing food standards and entrenching corporate power through

expanded use of corporate courts.

These threats are becoming more real as Boris Johnson’s rhetoric on a nodeal Brexit this autumn increases the likelihood of a sweeping trade deal with the US. We are still fighting for trade democracy to give MPs the powers to scrutinise and, if necessary, stop trade deals. But the trade bill is currently stalled and looks likely to be dropped altogether by Johnson’s government.

Our legal case is a way of highlighting to the public just how little we’re currently allowed to know about future trade deals – and increasing pressure to give parliament democratic controls over trade.

Circulate our petition against a US-UK trade deal at globaljustice.org.uk/UStradedeal

© TJ Chuah/War on Want

Above: One of the documents 'released' to us by the Department for International Trade after our freedom of information request.

Main photo: Projecting our protest about Lydian International’s threat to sue Armenia in a corporate court onto their London registered office. See page 8 for more.

2018 Ninety-Nine 3

CAMPAIGN NEWS

© Kevin Hayes

‘Subvertising’ the Home Office over migration To mark Refugee Week in June, Our Future Now (Global Justice Now’s London youth group) made and put up subverted adverts on London Underground trains condemning the Home Office’s Hostile Environment. The posters are constructed to appear as if it is the Home Office which is exposing itself.

The ads highlight how many of the Windrush generation the Home Office have detained and deported and also show the numbers of people currently locked up each year in UK detention centres. Our Future Now member Hiba Ahmad said: “We hope that this campaign, done with passion and righteous anger, will ignite our collective rage, help end the hostile environment and begin to tear down the walls keeping us apart.”

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National gathering: Resisting the corporate trade agenda When Donald Trump visited the UK in June, he said the NHS would “absolutely… be on the table” in any trade deal with the US. So when over a hundred people joined The Real Trade War in Birmingham at the end of that week the issues we explored couldn’t have felt more relevant or urgent.

Analyst Gyekye Tanoh of Third World Network Africa opened the event with a roof-raising broadside against modern free trade deals, focusing especially on the disastrous impacts on farming in his home country, Ghana. He spoke of how these deals are rigged in the interests of big business and what strategies we need to win more democratic and progressive trade. Pia Eberhardt, from Corporate Europe Observatory (left), fresh back from a tour of Europe’s corporate court cases gave us a thorough explainer on the disastrous abuse of democracy which is ISDS. The event had been preceded by Global Justice Now's AGM which passed a motion giving the organisation more impetus to work on climate justice, which was a positive start to the day. The chance to hear from international allies was also appreciated.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

UK opposes affordable medicine for the world

Gary Younge imagines a world without borders ‘The map of my utopian world has no borders...I believe in the free movement of people’. This was how award winning author, broadcaster and columnist Gary Younge began his conversation with Laura Parker (head of Momentum) on migration, borders and the global economy in front of a packed room of 300 people at our event in May. Younge discussed the UK’s role in fuelling migration throughout history, from colonialism to military interventions, toxic trade deals to climate change. The problems we are seeing today, he explained, with the Windrush generation and the hostile environment, aren’t an accident but are part of a system rigged against people in the global south and people of colour.

The alternative, according to Gary, requires us to use our imagination. The far-right have already envisioned the world they want – a world of borders, hierarchy and nationalism. To beat them, we too must start imagining and fighting for the world we want – one which puts global justice at its heart, and where borders are a distant memory.

In May the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the UN’s World Health Organisation, convened in Geneva. On the table was an ambitious resolution to tackle secrecy in the pharmaceutical industry and to improve transparency over how medicines are priced globally.

Global Justice Now and STOPAIDS discovered that the UK was attempting to weaken the proposal, including taking out any references to high-priced medicines. In response we co-ordinated a twitter and email campaign urging the health secretary and international development secretary to withdraw the UK’s irresponsible amendments and support the global effort for affordable medicines. And globally, we joined 50 civil society organisations in a letter to the delegates, pushing for a consensus on the strongest resolution.

Unfortunately the watered-down version of the resolution was agreed. The UK government capitulated to the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying power and then, worse still, publicly disassociated themselves from the resolution they actively helped to weaken.

Although weakened, the resolution and the international mobilisation around it has propelled the problem of high drug prices to the forefront of the global political agenda on health. The global movement is united in its fight to challenge high drug prices and the corporate grip over medicine.

© Pan American Hea

lth Organization

Delegates at the 2019 World Health Assembly.

GLOBAL NEWS MOVEMENT NEWS

Indigenous community wins legal case over oil drilling in Ecuador

© Amazon Frontlines

Nemonte Nenquimo, lead plaintiff in the case, speaks to reporters.

The Waorani indigenous nation has won a landmark legal case against the Ecuadorean government which will prevent the sale of oil exploration concessions on its land. Judges agreed with the plaintiffs that the legally-required consultation involved no real dialogue with the community and inadequate translation and advance notice.

Elders told the court that the 2012

consultation was largely used to promote oil drilling to the community.

“This victory is for my ancestors. It’s for our forest and future generations.

And it’s for the whole world,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, president of the Waorani Pastaza Organisation (CONCONAWEP). “We have shown that life is more important than oil and that united we can protect our way of life, the Amazon rainforest

and our planet from destruction.”

Consultations with other indigenous nationalities which happened at the same time are now thrown into doubt.

Last year the Kofan community also won a case against the Ecuadorean government for allowing mining to continue near their territory without undertaking a consultation, leading to the cancellation of 52 concessions.

Campaigner against UK development-funded palm oil plantation murdered An activist with the Congolese environmental and human rights organisation RIAO-RDC has been killed, apparently by a security guard working for the company he was campaigning against. Joël Imbangola Lunea was a community activist who was opposing a palm oil plantation run by Feronia in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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According to reports, Mr Lunea was approached by a security guard at Feronia’s Boteka plantation, who proceeded to brutally beat him and throw his body into the Moboyo River.

Local communities say the plantation land was illegally taken from them and that they have suffered months of intimidation since they started advocating for their rights.

CDC Group, a company wholly owned by the UK’s Department for International Development, is a major investor in Feronia, with the latest funding agreed as recently as March 2019. Each year dozens of environmental rights defenders are murdered around the world as a result of their work.

GLOBAL MOVEMENT GLOBAL NEWS

NEWS SHORTS

Corporate court orders Pakistan to pay $5.8bn refused, meaning the damages, if paid in full, would represent a 2,600% return on investment.

Among the original reasons for refusing full mining licences was vocal public opposition in the Balochistan region for a project with few benefits for local people.

The Pakistani government has sought to enter into negotiation with the company over the size of the payment but Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee, a national network of peasant organisations, said: “We demand from the Pakistani government not to pay this unfair fine. Pakistan must use all its resources to launch a campaign against this decision nationally and internationally”.

The Indian state of Kerala has recommitted to organic and co-operative farming, in the face of the central government’s plan to open up the sector to agribusiness through its ‘contract farming’ system. Describing the policy as ‘corporate feudalism’, Kerala’s leftwing government promotes agricultural co-operatives and the collective women’s rural empowerment network known as Kudumbashree.

An investment tribunal has ordered Pakistan to pay US$5.8 billion in damages to Tethyan Copper, a joint venture between Chilean mining company Antofagasta and Canadian mining company Barrick Gold.

The judgement comes nearly a decade after the government refused the company licences to mine one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of copper and gold.

The company took Pakistan to the World Bank’s investment tribunal, ICSID, which made a judgement in the company’s favour in 2017 but has only now ruled on the size of damages, which is almost the same sum as the country’s recent IMF bailout loan. Tethyan Copper says it invested US$220 million before full licences were

Chilean plebiscite rejects TPP

Kenyan campaigners halt coal-fired power plant

Fight over future of farming in India

A referendum on Chile’s participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) organised by the Chile Mejor Sin TLC (Chile better off without free trade deals) coalition attracted 580,000 participants, with 93% rejecting the mega trade deal. The coalition hopes the high level of participation in the online poll will influence the Chilean senate during its imminent vote on the deal.

UK is world’s second biggest arms exporter

Arms exports from the UK reached £14 billion in 2018, pushing the UK ahead of Russia and behind only the US by sales value. In June the Court of Appeal ruled that some arms sales to Saudi Arabia were unlawful because the government had not considered whether they were likely to be used against civilians in Yemen before licensing them.

© DeCOALonize movement

Activists mobilised the local community against the new power plant.

Kenya’s National Environmental Tribunal has revoked a licence to build Kenya’s first coal-fired power plant in the coastal city of Lamu after a legal team for local campaigners successfully argued that dangers to marine life, fishing communities and historic buildings had been ignored.

The Kenyan government’s plans for the plant, which is backed by Chinese finance, stands in apparent contradiction to President Kenyatta’s previously stated aim of reaching 100% renewable energy as soon as 2020, based on hydroelectric, wind

and geothermal power.

“There is no need to build centralised dirty sources of energy such as coal to answer Kenya’s energy demands, especially when the country is taking the lead in Africa with an 85% renewable energy base,” said Omar Elmawi, coordinator of DeCOALonize, the Kenyan campaign against coal power.

Amu Power, the consortium building the plant, must now submit a new environmental impact assessment if it wishes to apply for a new licence.

2019 Ninety-Nine 7

TRADE JUSTICE

A toxic attack on democracy Armenian activists ANNA SHAHNAZARYAN and ARPINE GALFAYAN report on community resistance to a gold mine and how a corporate court case could undermine it Opposite: Global Justice Now and War on Want campaigners visit the Amulsar blockade in June.

Below: Ani Khachatryan from the Armenian Environmental Front in front of the construction site.

A country with a rugged landscape, with what lies underneath valued in market terms. Rigged elections that have produced an opaque ruling elite. A population shrinking in number but growing in anger. This, until recently, was Armenia.

But in May 2018, the people of Armenia mobilised in an action of civil disobedience against the ruling authoritarian regime and overthrew it. Sparked by the success of this historic uprising, communities oppressed by the former government saw a hope of seeking a solution to their long-standing grievances.

On 22 June 2018, after several previous thwarted attempts, the locals of Jermuk and its adjacent villages blocked the roads leading to Amulsar Mountain – once home to their pastures, orchards and unique biodiversity, now turned into a goldmining site.

The open-cast mining project was, at this point, under construction, with no excavation yet in operation. This was

the escalation of an almost 10-year-long anti-mining struggle at Amulsar and all over Armenia. The 24/7 blockades have stretched for an entire year, with the newly elected government still on the fence about the mine and, as yet, hands off with the protestors.

With all work on the mine now stopped by the protests, the operations of Lydian International, the mining firm behind the scheme, are in crisis. Lydian, based in Colorado (USA) but also registered in London and UK tax-haven Jersey, is a small, inexperienced company backed by various hedge funds and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

TOXIC MINING Mining has been a big issue in Armenia for many years. On a territory of around 30,000km2, an area around the size of Belgium, there are over 400 mines, 22 of which are licensed metal mines in various stages of operation.

Š TJ Chuah/War on Want

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TRADE JUSTICE

Around one billion tons of toxic mining waste has already been dumped in dams across the country. Water and land near the mining areas are highly contaminated, posing grave environmental and public health problems. For years, environmental activists and local communities have been fighting to halt new mining projects, while they © TJ Chuah/War on Wan t struggle with the consequences of existing mines.

Like much of Armenia, Amulsar locals of how invaluable their home mountain is situated in a sensitive is; how abundant it is with alternative hydrological area. The mountain is economic pathways. Jermuk, just 6-7km the source of two major rivers, with away from Amulsar, was a thriving hundreds of springs which irrigate health tourism destination for the entire thousands of hectares of land used Soviet Union. It continues to receive by communities for horticulture, thousands of spa tourists each year. wine-making and farming. The rivers, Angered that they have not furthermore, are home to various been formally consulted before the aquatic species and a source of life for commissioning of the mine, many other wildlife. of the blockaders are residents of The mountain also feeds a complex this town that have stood up to system of dams and tunnels designed protect their rights and carry out their to supply water to Lake Sevan, the constitutional duty of taking care for largest and most important freshwater the environment. This has sparked other body in Armenia on which the entire communities in the region to petition ecosystem of the country depends. against any prospect of metal mining Scientists warn that if the mountain in their areas. rocks are exposed to air and water, irreversible processes of acid drainage CORPORATE COURTS will start, affecting underground and While the new government is trying to surface waters for centuries to come. navigate between the democratic Other communities of Armenia already demands of its citizens and the suffer from acid rock drainage from pressure of international business both operating and abandoned supporters, hedge funds and banks, mining sites, such as in Kapan, the Armenia now faces a new threat: largest town in the south of Armenia. corporate courts.

What is stunning about the resistance Lydian is using the threat of a $2bn at Amulsar is the sense from the ISDS lawsuit in an attempt to bully the

Armenian government into forcefully removing the protestors at Amulsar.

Corporate courts are being used to undermine the Armenian people’s struggle for democracy, holding the new government to ransom to push it to betray local communities.

Lydian’s decision on whether to proceed with the corporate court case could come any time now. And despite being based in Colorado, USA, the company is using a letterbox registration in London to take the case under the ISDS provisions in a UKArmenia investment agreement. That’s why we particularly need UK activists to speak out in solidarity with the people of Armenia.

The past year of struggle in Armenia shows the remarkable things that people power can achieve, from overthrowing a repressive government to blocking polluting mining. Together, we can stop Lydian’s toxic attack on democracy and end corporate courts for good.

Anna Shahnazaryan and Arpine Galfayan are part of the Save Amulsar campaign. Additional reporting by Global Justice Now’s James Angel.

2019 Ninety-Nine 9

trade justice

When Johnson meets Trump With Boris Johnson in number 10, a trade deal with Trump’s United States is even more likely. NICK DEARDEN lays out the potential consequences. concerned less with tariffs (import taxes), Boris Johnson has been clear that a trade and more with how a country can regulate deal with the US is an absolute priority for food standards, run public services and him and has planned a series of meetings treat overseas investors, a trade deal with with Trump’s administration, while snubbing the US would be a powerful mechanism for European leaders. Johnson’s new Trade transforming our economy.

Secretary Liz Truss met the US ambassador Trump’s administration, unlike our own to talk trade only a few days into her new government, has told us exactly what they job. So what is this trade deal likely to mean want from a trade deal with us. First, they for us? are clear that under a trade deal, Britain Johnson’s new cabinet is stacked with must allow food produced in enormous ultra-free marketeers who are deeply animal factories, pumped with steroids, sceptical about protections for workers, hormones and antibiotics into our markets. consumers or the environment. Liz Truss That’s the chlorine chicken but it’s also herself is a turbo-charged Thatcherite who more pesticides allowed on vegetables in 2012 co-authored a report with other and more pus cells acceptable in milk – as Conservative MPs who are now in key well as less labelling, which would at least government positions: Priti Patel, Dominic allow us to know what we’re eating. British Raab and Kwasi Kwarteng. ‘Britannia farmers will naturally lobby to push down Unchained’ claimed the British were our own standards unless they want to be “among the worst idlers in the world”, and declared war on the “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation”. e Hou se The post-Brexit trade © D. Myle s Cullen/The Whit deals Truss hopes to sign give her the perfect vehicle to introduce some of the policies the report advocated – none more so than a trade deal with the United States. Many Brexiteers have looked longingly across the Atlantic for decades, to an economy where, as they see it, business is free from the shackles of tax and regulation. And because modern trade deals are

10 Ninety-Nine 2018

Above: Trade campaigners drop a banner at Tower Bridge in London during Donald Trump's state visit to the UK in July.

Below: Boris Johnson meets Donald Trump at the United Nations while Foreign Secretary in 2017.

trade justice

papers during negotiation.

When parliament tried to give itself the power to stop trade deals earlier this year, Fox simply left his Trade Bill to die © Jes s Hurd/Glob al Justice Now in the House of Lords. So Liz Truss will be operating forced out of business because they under royal can’t compete with these industrially In July documents were leaked from prerogative.

What’s more, these trade produced horrors. the US trade talks to the Telegraph, deals have the status of international But it’s about much more than documents that neither we nor our treaties, which means they take chlorine chicken. The US wants us to MPs had been allowed to see. They precedence over domestic law and accept even greater monopoly rights show that the US is streets ahead of us can be difficult to for big pharmaceutical corporations, in negotiating extricate yourself meaning higher prices for medicines ability and that from. and more strain on the NHS. They will they are fully Many Brexiteers In the months want to lock in privatisation of those prepared to use look longingly ahead, we will parts of the NHS which are already a trade deal need to work with being run by private companies. And to prise Britain across the Atlantic others to build they will want more opportunities for away from the to an economy free a movement US companies to win procurement standards and contracts, potentially making it more protections we from the shackles of capable of stopping this difficult for public services to purchase enjoy in the EU. tax and regulation trade deal, just supplies from good quality local US negotiators as we did on TTIP. businesses and farmers. were clear that if We’ll need to The US wants us to allow the Silicon we want a trade continue to support trade democracy Valley tech firms from Amazon to deal with the US, we will not be able in parliament, something which all Facebook to Google to have greater to introduce the sort of special tax on opposition parties now agree with us power to use and abuse our data.

Silicon Valley corporations which the on, and ensure that people understand And they want to extend the rights previous chancellor, Philip Hammond, the impact of modern trade deals on of American corporations to enjoy proposed, and which is being our everyday lives. We’re in for one hell ‘regulatory stability’, potentially introduced now in France. giving them the right to sue the British During his time at the Department for of a battle to protect people from the ravages of the free market. government in secret ‘corporate courts’ International Trade, Liam Fox refused for daring to do things like introduce a to give MPs any right to amend or Nick Dearden is the director of sugar tax or pass a law to stop fracking. stop trade deals or even to see the Global Justice Now

2018 Ninety-Nine 11

CLIMATE BREAKDOWN

Going beyond growth?

For decades, carbon emissions have grown in lockstep with the expansion of the economy. JAMES O’NIONS argues that climate justice requires an economy beyond growth and profit Illustrations by Cressida Knapp

12 Ninety-Nine 2019

Our political discourse is obsessed with growth. Despite numerous critiques, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth remains the key indicator of the health of the economy for politicians and economists alike. There are good reasons for this.

Just like a bicycle which falls over when it stops moving forward, capitalism without growth cannot sustain itself for long.

Privatisation, globalisation, financialisation – all these phenomena are driven by the constant search for new areas of growth.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that when politicians on both the right and centreleft talk about dealing with climate change, they reach for the phrase ‘green growth’.

Even some of the most successful ecological parties such as the German Greens speak this language. The idea is that we can shift entirely to renewable energy, increase rates of recycling and so on, and the underlying structure of the economy does not need to change. The problem is that it just doesn’t work.

A recent report by the European Environmental Bureau, a coalition of mainstream European environmental organisations, titled Decoupling Debunked, looked specifically at the viability of a green growth strategy. It concluded that there is no evidence that ‘decoupling’ growth from environmental destruction had happened or has any likelihood of happening at the scale, pace or in as generalised a way as is needed to combat climate breakdown. It suggested, rather cautiously in the circumstances, that “addressing environmental breakdown may require a direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in the wealthiest countries”.

To put it another way, if the global economy grows at 3% per year, it will have doubled in size by 2043. Even with widespread energy efficiency measures, shifting to renewable energy on this scale would be an enormous task. And the raw materials required for renewable energy infrastructure – lithium, copper, rare earth minerals – are themselves not inexhaustible and in some cases based on mining processes which have serious environmental and human rights consequences in the global south.

Of course, electricity production is not the most difficult area for reducing carbon

CLIMATE BREAKDOWN

In fact, as economist Ann Pettifor described at our conference on growth and climate justice earlier this year, dealing with the power of the financial sector is crucial, as its current power to create debt without much in the way of limit or oversight is a key driver of the continued need for economic growth. The capitalist requirement for growth isn’t just down to the greed of the few, it’s a product A POST-GROWTH ECONOMY of the need for returns on investment, So what would it mean to actually shift and the financial sector is at the to a post-growth economy? There are centre of that. plenty of practical measures which Jason Hickel describes the state of could reduce material consumption – affairs we should be aiming towards as tough legislation one of ‘radical around the abundance’: We should be durability of using the goods and using the resources resources we the outlawing have to create we have to of planned collective obsolescence; create collective wellbeing massive curbs rather than an wellbeing rather on advertising; economy of than profitintroducing a profit-maximising right to repair; maximising growth growth. We organisations would have to promote less material collective use instead of ownership, consumption, but actually more of like car and tool clubs. Combined with other things – social care, health, an expansion of public services and education, free time, cultural life – the commons in housing, for instance, with needs met and rights realised this would allow people to lead good collectively. It is undoubtedly one lives without high incomes. which would have to challenge In order to deal with this scaling the power not just of fossil fuel down of economic activity, we would corporations but the whole system, so also need to shorten the working how we get there is important. week and consider something like a universal basic income. This would also THE GREEN NEW DEAL PLUS free up time for people to undertake The Green New Deal, a concept low carbon activities, from caring work which has been gaining ground to growing food. among progressives recently, But crucially, all this needs to happen could be an important within a framework of a reduction bridge. Green MP of inequality and a redistribution of Caroline Lucas wealth. In this context, relocalisation describes it as “a means not just reducing food miles but huge investment in bringing big corporations and banks renewable energy back ‘onshore’ - ensuring we can tax and energy efficiency, them through eliminating tax havens. programmes to insulate emissions. Industrial agriculture is driving deforestation and driving down the capacity for soil to absorb carbon. There are currently no viable alternatives to fossil fuels in air travel, which continues to expand. And carbon emissions from the production of goods have so far largely been shifted to the global south, creating a false sense of progress in the global north.

every building in Britain, a move to a more sustainable farming system and to bring hope and jobs to communities hollowed out by deindustrialisation”.

Labour thinking is moving along similar lines, though so far the party leadership has more often described it as a Green Industrial Strategy, while also emphasising important changes to ownership such as the nationalisation of the energy industry, which would take power out of the hands of corporations. The grassroots Labour for a Green New Deal campaign has been asking party branches to submit motions to its autumn conference which also emphasise a just transition to green jobs, transfers of technology and finance to the global south, and welcoming climate refugees.

All these policies are vitally important and we need to mobilise around them. But if the focus is growth, then emissions could continue to rise. In 2009, South Korea announced a US$38 billion investment into environmental projects aimed to create a million jobs.

Its emissions were 15 percent higher in 2014 than in 2008.

2019 Ninety-Nine 13

CLIMATE BREAKDOWN

GROWTH AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

combines social justice with living in harmony with nature. It is corporate Where does a post-growth agenda globalisation, pursued relentlessly leave the global south? Human by governments in the global north, wellbeing is still so low for many in which has pushed in the opposite the global south, that some kind of direction on both economic growth these fronts. is surely needed, If the global In fact, the though the kind economy grows at critique of growth currently taking place there is 3% per year, it will and the western development often ratcheting have doubled in model coming up inequality (see from the global size by 2043 page 18). Of course south is one we it is high income can learn from. For countries who are currently consuming instance, Walden Bello’s concept of at levels which overshoot planetary deglobalisation focuses on how we ecological boundaries so severely, can undo the power of transnational so it’s here that we need to deal with corporations in order to achieve growth most urgently. economic and climate justice. This isn’t But while social movements in the global south are often understandably about a simple return to the nation state, but new forms of international dubious about the idea of ‘degrowth’ governance which redistribute wealth per se, they have often developed over the past decades a politics which and undercut exploitation.

Students join the global climate youth strikes in Manila in May.

© Leo Sabangan II/350.org

14 Ninety-Nine 2019

Meanwhile La Via Campesina, the global movement of small farmers, uses the slogan ‘peasant agriculture cools down the Earth’, and has worked to spread agroecology as an alternative to industrial farming.

The concept isn’t just about organic farming but also democratising production in the hands of producers and consumers.

As we stare down the barrel of the climate breakdown gun, talking about the problem of growth can seem like one difficult argument too far.

But concern about climate change is reaching unprecedented levels internationally. If we can talk about solving it through building community, solidarity and egalitarian abundance, then the kind of systemic change we need might start to sound like common sense.

James O'Nions is Global Justice Now’s head of activism and a former editor of Red Pepper magazine.

rs e rt o p p u s w o N e c ti s u J Global ike on Join the global climate str have been Young people around the world each month to walking out of school on Fridays ernment action on protest against the lack of gov y are calling on the climate emergency. Now the of protest, starting adults to join them for a week Friday 20 September. with a global climate strike on full support to the Global Justice Now is giving its be out there on global climate strike, and we’ll others around the the streets along with millions of and an end to world to demand climate justice like this, on this scale, the age of fossil fuels. Nothing scale of the climate has been done before. But the emergency means it’s vital. tests across the There will be marches and pro lions of people are UK and around the world. Mil laces and homes expected to leave their workp join us? and take to the streets. Will you

y campaigned for Global Justice Now has activel er by demanding climate justice since 2007, wheth

20 September

legally binding reductions in carbon emissions, exposing false solutions pedalled by corporations to maintain the status quo, or working with movements in the global south to ensure their voices are heard. Through that time our focus has been on the unjust economic system that gives power of democracy to big business at the expense lling the climate and equality – and which is fue emergency.

ent to change that It’s going to take a mass movem global climate economic system. That’s why the hopeful - moment. strike is such an important - and d in your area via Find out what’s being planne strike.net the website at: globalclimate

Now 50 years of Global Justice years since In 2020 we’ll be celebrating 50 blis hed as the Global Justice Now wa s esta (WDM). We’re World Development Movement ent over the years collecting stories of the movem for the following: and are looking in par ticular WDM? When did • What is your first memory of you join and why? ies from events or • Do you have photos or stor with? protests you’ve been involved r magazine from • Do you have copies of Spu 1971-75?

Global justice podcast Global Justice We’ve launched a brand new epth look at Now podcast to provide an in-d epi sode we've our campaign topics. In the first gners about interviewed a range of campai environment' the UK government’s 'hostile

• Do you know anyone else who might not receive Ninety-Nine but has been involved in WDM and could share their memories or some materials with us?

If so, get in touch! Phone 020 7820 490 0 and ask to speak to the comms team.

Or write to us at Global don SW9 0LS. Justice Now, 66 Offley Road, Lon

for migrants, the impact it is hav movement against it.

Listen or download at: globaljustice.org.uk/podcast

ing, and the

IN PICTURES MIGRATION

There is no planet B While Extinction Rebellion caught the public imagination in the UK, the last year has also seen diverse protest and direct action movements around the world step up their efforts – confronting the corporations driving the climate crisis and demanding effective action from governments.

4

5 6

16 Ninety-Nine 2018

MIGRATION IN PICTURES XXX

1

1. School students in Chile join the global climate strike on 24 May. Inspired

by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, students around the world have been holding regular Friday school strikes.

Initially concentrated in northern Europe, the strike in May saw huge protests right around the world. © Esteban Felix/AP/ Shutterstock

2 3

2. Germany has seen escalating direct action protests against its domestic coal industry over the last few years, including this one in October 2018 against plans to bulldoze the remainder of the Hambach Forest to develop a new opencast mine. In January the German government announced plans to shut down all 84 of its coalfired power plants over the next 19 years.

3. The permit to build Kenya’s first coal-fired power station has been suspended after an effective campaign by local activists. See full story page 6. © DeCOALonize movement 4. The Pacific Climate Warriors hold a rally in the island nation of Vanuatu. © 350.org 5. A public meeting demanding climate action in Rivers State, Nigeria. © 350.org 6. Climate justice campaigners demonstrate their opposition to the lack of progress and corporate capture at the UN climate conference in Katowice in December. © Richard Dixon/Friends of the Earth Scotland

© Leon Enrique

2018 Ninety-Nine 17

CORPORATE POWER

Multinationals are driving super-exploitation in Africa The ‘African miracle’ of recent economic growth has accrued profits to western corporations, while actually fuelling inequality and poverty, writes GYEKYE TANOH. But there is a fightback.

Across Africa, foreign multinationals are increasingly penetrating every aspect of people’s lives, from seeds and pesticides to microcredit. At the same time, the economy of Africa as a whole is still overwhelmingly dependent on the export of raw materials, whether that’s food crops, minerals or oil.

A 2010 report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development concluded that Africa’s economy now looks more like it did under colonialism than it has at any time since independence.

Monopolies by foreign capital and multinational companies, including over ports and infrastructure, and enabled by international trade and investment rules, have increasingly created a new type of exploitation of African labour, the environment and strategic natural resources.

Historically African governments, under pressure from their populations to improve lives, have been able to insist on varying degrees of public ownership and increasing share of returns from natural resource exports. In the recent past, they’ve included provisions in investment agreements for local employment, transfer of technology to build local knowledge, or affirmative action ensuring women are trained in managerial skills. That is all gone now as the power of western governments and multinationals to dictate terms has grown.

As a result, people are forced to revert to the most back breaking labour and precarious livelihoods and we can see an increase in ‘super-exploitation’, where people are paid far less than they can survive on. This is now a fundamental feature of how African economies are developing. Ethiopia is often held up as a model economy, with an average 6% economic growth over the last 20-plus years, including 9.5% last year. But Ethiopian textile workers are paid around a tenth of the wage their counterparts even in neighbouring Kenya are paid.

18 Ninety-Nine 2018

At the same time, monopoly control of services, infrastructure and technology, such as digital © Kevin Hayes finance Gyekye speaking at Global Justice Now's platforms, 2019 national gathering in Birmingham vastly extends the extraction of super-profits by corporations in Africa. Africa is a laboratory for huge experimentation by multinational companies. A lot of the trade rules and the privatisation people across Europe are protesting against was incubated first in African soil. Some of the most nationalist Brexiteers envisage intensifying such processes – part of the New Scramble for Africa in which other competing global powers including the US and China are also deeply involved.

Yet while Africa is the frontline for global inequality, and the only continent where absolute poverty is growing, there is also a fightback. For instance, in Kenya there were huge strikes to stop DfID’s education privatisation policy – effectively charter schools – in its tracks. So far this year, five countries have banned this British model because of opposition.

It’s that kind of democratic pressure which we need to resist the neoliberal agenda – in Africa, in Europe and around the world.

Gyekye Tanoh is head of the political economy unit at Third World Network Africa, based in Ghana.

REVIEWS

Reviews AN EXTINCTION REBELLION HANDBOOK

INSURGENT EMPIRE: ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE AND BRITISH DISSENT

Penguin, 2019

Priyamvada Gopal

Through a series of short essays Extinction Rebellion’s ‘handbook for the rebellion’ outlines why we are in a climate emergency and how we can work collectively to get ourselves out of it. Many of the essays highlight that system change is imperative for dealing with the climate crisis. In one section Carne Ross, the ex-diplomat turned anarchist, draws inspiration from the social ecology revolution in Rojava. In another, a technology expert exposes how the rich are planning their escape and proposes that workers must join together to distribute the wealth that has accumulated in the hands of a few.

Priyamvada Gopal spent years researching into archives to tell the stories of empire that many of us have never heard and formulating an argument that many of us haven’t considered. This book is the result.

From prominent climate activists in the global south (the ex-President of the Maldives and environmental activist Vandana Shiva), to the voices of those who are currently facing the realities of climate breakdown (the Joshis in the Himalayas) this book does its best to centre black, brown and indigenous voices. Despite the valid criticism that Extinction Rebellion’s aims and actions fail to address systemic issues, their handbook successfully interweaves the need for a just transition to a carbon neutral world with instructions on how to do it.

Rosanna Wiseman

Verso, 2019

By exploring various rebellions starting with the Indian mutiny in 1857 and ending with Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising in 1950, she recovers a complicated history of empire to explicitly highlight the long tradition of resistance to empire in Britain which was shaped by colonial rebels and their ideas of freedom and liberation.

It’s easy to feel at a loss when the argument to return to the glorious days of empire is lauded by politicians and popularised in the media. That’s why this book is necessary. It’s a reminder that empire has always been resisted, led by those it tried to suppress with bloody wars and supported by a tradition of anticolonialism here in Britain.

Radhika Patel

CLIMATE HISTORY WALKING TOUR climatehistories.com Various dates, London From Shell’s human rights abuses in Nigeria to London’s allelectric taxis in the 1890s, this free climate crisis walking tour covers an array of interesting facts and stories about the city’s role in the history of the climate crisis. But thankfully it’s not three and a half miles of doom and gloom.

In fact, the tour guide Dr Alice Bell managed to strike a balance between stressing the irreversible damage that’s already been done and a greener and more sustainable future that’s not yet written. Although walking past the Home Office, I could have wished for more conversation around climate justice, I was more than satisfied with the amount of new things I had learned by the time we

reached the end point of the tour.

It’s obvious that Alice knows her stuff. Alongside her job as the director of communications at climate action group 10:10, she’s also currently writing a book on the history of the climate crisis to be published in 2021. After this tour, she can definitely put me on a pre-order list.

Malise Rosbech

2018 Ninety-Nine 19

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE TOMORROW Leave the future to a voice you can trust to shout loudly for what you believe in Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Alongside people like you, we’re standing up to injustice and fighting for a more just world. Where we all have access to the food, healthcare and education we deserve. Where people’s lives count for more than corporate profits.

Here at Global Justice Now we are unafraid to demand what you believe in and hold the powerful to account. For decades we’ve done hard-hitting research to expose injustice, and pushed for change with communities around the world. And we promise to keep doing so long after you’re gone. You can make this possible.

In 1970 a vibrant net wor k of activist groups tackling inequality came togethe set up Global Justice Now r to (then called the World Dev elopment Movement).

Around two thirds of our income comes from people like you, keeping our campaigns fierce and our voice unrestrained. By leaving a gift in your will to Global Justice Now you can make sure we’ll continue to fight for your values after you’re gone. A gift from you can make the difference of winning a campaign for generations to come.

“ ing to fight for a porters are continu bal Justice Now sup rch in 2016. ma me lco Fift y years later Glo We ees here at the Refug ed tur pic , rld wo more just

I am leaving Global Justice Now a gift in my will because the work they do is of the greatest importance. It is a long, hard battle we are embarked on – not just for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren.

”

M Chamberlain, Global Justice Now member and legacy pledger

For more information about including Global Justice Now in your will email Eleanor at eleanor.williams@globaljustice.org.uk or call her freephone on 0800 328 2153. Alternatively go to globaljustice.org.uk/leave-gift-your-will Global Justice Now: company no 2098198, Global Justice Now Trust: registered charity no 1064066, company no 3188734.