Noam Chomsky
At
a recent talk Chomsky was asked “What are the motivations of the U.S. push for
sustainable development in the developing world?” Here
was his answer…
Its
the first time I ever heard of that–does the U.S. have a push for sustainable
development? As far as I know, the U.S. push is for unsustainable nondevelopment.
The programs that are built into U.S policy, take a look at the World Trade
Organization rules, like, say, TRIPs and TRIMs–Trade-Related Intellectual
Property and Trade-Related Investment Measures are designed to impede
development and impede growth. So the intellectual property rights are just
protection of monopolistic pricing and control, guaranteeing that corporations,
in fact, by now, megacorporations, have the right to charge monopolistic prices,
guaranteeing, say, that pharmaceutical production drugs will be priced at a
level at which most of the world can’t afford them, even people here. For
example, drugs in the U.S. are much more expensive than the same drugs as close
as Canada, even more expensive than say, Europe, and for the third world this
just dooms millions of people to death.
Other
countries can produce the drugs. And under earlier patent regimes, you had
process patents. I don’t even know if those are legitimate, but process
patents meant that if some pharmaceutical company figured out a way to produce a
drug, somebody smarter could figure out a better way to produce it because all
that was patented was the process. So, if the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry
figured out a way to make it cheaper and better, fine, they could do it. It
wouldn’t violate patents. The World Trade Organization regime insists instead
on product patents, so you can’t figure out a smarter process. Notice that
impedes growth, and development and is intended to. It’s intended to cut back
innovation, growth, and development and to maintain extremely high profits.
Well,
the pharmaceutical corporations and others claim they need this so they can
recoup the costs of research and development. But have a close look. A very
substantial part of the research and development is paid for by the public
anyway. In a narrow sense, it’s on the order of 40-50%. But that’ s an
underestimate, because it doesn’t count the basic biology and the basic
science, which is all publicly funded. So if you get a realistic amount, it’ s
a very high percentage that’s publicly paid anyway. Well, suppose that went to
100%. Then all the motivation for monopolistic pricing would be gone, and
there’d be a huge welfare benefit to it. There’s no justifiable economic
motive for not doing this. There’s some economic motive, profit, but it is an
effort to impede growth and development.
But
what about Trade-Related Investment Measures? What do they do? TRIPS is straight
protectionism for the benefit of the rich and powerful, through publicly
subsidized corporations. TRIMs are a little more subtle. What they require is
that a country cannot impose conditions on what an investor decides to do.
Suppose General Motors, let’s say, decides to carry out outsourcing, to have
parts made in some other country with non-union cheap labor, and then send them
back to General Motors. Well, the successful developing countries in Asia, one
of the ways they developed is by blocking that sort of thing, by insisting that
if there was foreign investment, it had to be done in a way that was productive
for the receiving country. So there had to be technology transfer, or you had to
invest in places they wanted you to invest in, or some proportion of the
investment had to be for export of finished goods that made money. Lots of
devices like that. That’s part of the way in which the East Asian economic
miracle took place. Incidentally, it’s the way all the other developing
countries developed too, including the United States, with technology transfer
from England. Those approaches are blocked by Trade-Related Investment Measures.
Superficially they sound like they are increasing free trade, but what they are
in fact increasing is the capacity of huge corporations to carry out central
managemnent of cross-border transactions, because that’s what outsourcing and
intrafirm transfers are –centrally managed. It’s not trade in any meaningful
sense. And they again undermine growth and development.
In
fact, if you look across the board, what’s being instituted is a regime which
will prevent the kind of development that has taken place in the countries that
today are rich, industrial countries—not the best kind of development we can
imagine, to be sure, but at least development of a sort. If you go back from
England to the United States, to Germany, France, Japan, Korea–every one of
these countries developed by radically violating the principles that are now
being built into the World Trade Organization. These principles are methods of
undermining growth and development and ensuring concentration of power. The
issue of sustainable development doesn’t even arise. That’s another question
altogether. Sustainable development means, for example, paying attention to what
are called externalities, the things businesses don’t look at.
So
take, say, trade. Trade is supposed to increase wealth. Maybe it does, maybe it
doesn’t, but you don’t know what it does until you count in the costs of
trade, including costs which are not counted, like, for example the cost of
pollution. When something moves from here to there it’s creating pollution.
It’s called an externality; you don’t count it. There’s resource
depletion, like you deplete the resources of agricultural production. There’ s
military costs. For example, the price of oil is kept within a certain band, not
too high, not too low, by a very substantial part of the Pentagon directed
toward the Middle East oil producers, not because the United States likes desert
training or something, but because that’s where the oil is. You want to make
sure it doesn’t get too high, doesn’t get too low, but stays where you want
it. There hasn’t been much investigation of this, but one investigation by a
consultant for the U.S. energy department estimated that Pentagon expenses alone
amount to maybe a 30% subsidy to the price of oil, something in that range.
Well,
you look across the board, there’s lots of things like this. One of the costs
of trade is that it drives people out of their livelihoods. When you export
subsidized U.S. agricultural products to Mexico, it drives millions of peasants
out of farming. That’s a cost. In fact, it’s a multiple cost, because those
millions of people not only suffer, but they are driven into the cities where
they lower wages, so other people suffer–including, incidentally, American
workers, who now are competing with even lower paid wages. These are costs. If
you take them into account, you get a totally different picture of economic
interactions entirely.
Incidentally,
that’s also true just of something like Gross Domestic Product. You take a
look at the measures of Gross Domestic Product, and they ’re highly
ideological. For example, one of the ways to increase the Gross Domestic Product
in the United States is to do what, in fact, it’s doing, not repair roads. If
you don’t repair roads and you have a lot of potholes all over the place, that
means when cars drive, they get smashed up. That means you’ve got to buy a new
car. Or you have to go to mechanic and get him to fix it, and so on. All of that
increases the Gross Domestic Product. You make people sicker by polluting the
atmosphere. That increases the Gross Domestic Product because they have to go to
the hospital and they have to pay doctors and they have to have drugs, and so
on. In fact, what increases the Gross Domestic Product in societies aas they are
now organized is often not a measure of welfare in any meaningful sense.
There
have been efforts to construct other measures which do take account of these
things and they give you very different stories. For example, the United States
is one of the few industrial countries that does not publish regular “social
indicators”–measures of social welfare, like child abuse, mortality, all
kinds of things. Most countries do it. Every year they have a social indicator
measure. The United States doesn’t, so it’s kind of hard to get a measure of
the social health of the country. But there have been efforts to do it.
There’s
one major project at Fordham University, a Jesuit university in New York. For
years they’ve been trying to construct a social health measure for the United
States. They just came out with the last volume a couple months ago. It’s
interesting stuff. According to their analyses of the kinds of measures of the
sort I’ve mentioned, up until about 1975, that is, through the “golden
age,” as it’s called, social health went up, more or less, with the economy.
It kind of tracked the economy. As that got better, social health got better.
From 1975 they’ve diverged. The economy has continued to grow, even though
more slowly than before, but social health has declined. And it’s continuing
to decline. In fact, they conclude that the United States is in a recession, a
serious recession, from the point of view of measures that matter. That’s when
you’re beginning to look at questions like sustainable development, meaningful
development. But that requires a completely different perspective on all of
these issues of economy and consequences, etc., one that definitely should be
undertaken. And those are the issues that arise when people are talking about
sustainable development, but the U.S. certainly has no such program. It should,
but it doesn’t.