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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #09-99 Challenging Economic Colonialism in Africa Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week on Making Contact:- Ethel Long-Scott: Africa has the largest number of poor countries on the planet. That’s not okay, and we need to have policies that either uplift the standard of life, the actual human rights of women and children and men in those areas, or they need to be thrown out. Lynn Wanyeki: Our health has gone dramatically down. We’re all involved in the structural adjustment programs, and enhanced structural adjustment programs and really the point of all this is to cut down on social service spending. Phillip Babich: Behind the scenes, Clinton administration officials have been pushing members of congress to support a far-reaching trade bill known as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. A key component of President Clinton's trade agenda, this legislation would provide greater access for multinational corporations to labor and natural resources on the African continent. On this program we take a look at U.S. trade policy and Africa. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact. When Congress debated the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, labor and human rights groups mobilized to oppose the bill, saying it would cost American jobs and lower standards and wages for Mexican workers. A bill with similar -- and perhaps further-reaching -- provisions is now wending its way through Congress and this time the target is Africa. It's called the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. African countries would be forced to open up to foreign investment and privatize state-run industries. Strict austerity measures, like those required by the International Monetary Fund, are also part of the bill. As with the NAFTA debate, a coalition, including African groups and some African-American organizations, has banded together to oppose the bill they have dubbed NAFTA-for-Africa. But this time they have something NAFTA opponents didn't have: an alternative bill. This one is known as the Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership and Empowerment for Africa Act, or HOPE. It was introduced by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. in February 1999 and is gaining momentum. These two competing bills raise broader issues: What would a progressive agenda for trade and investment look like? And, where is the so-called free trade agenda taking us? To explore these issues we spoke with Ethel Long-Scott and Laura Livoti. Long-Scott is executive director of the Women's Economic Agenda Project. Livoti is this radio program's managing director. And she's also with the organization Economic Justice Now. Livoti begins with some background on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Laura Livoti: It’s been dubbed NAFTA-for-Africa; it’s been called by Randall Robinson of trans-Africa "lethal medicine for Africa." The bill would do a number of things. It would impose economic austerity measures on African countries, that would require that they privatize industries. Privatizing industries means that the government no longer would get the revenues from those industries and would therefore have to cut back on other social services that they provide. It requires that they make cuts in health spending, in education, and in agricultural subsidies. The bill also requires that African countries seek entry into the WTO, which is the World Trade Organization. And entering into the World Trade Organization means that an African country would have to roll back its own laws that are considered to be out of compliance with the WTO. Laws that are out of compliance are laws that protect things like the environment or labor rights. Ethel Long-Scott: This bill on Africa is really being led by the Clinton Administration, and representing the Globalists in no uncertain terms, and the world is really divided between the haves and the have-nots. And I’m not so sure it’s so much neo-colonial, because I think that actually has already happened unfortunately, in the continent of Africa. But I think that what we’re seeing is a sort of re-colonization, with new leaders and owners, and Africa has the largest number of poor countries on the planet. That’s not okay, and we need to have policies that either uplift the standard of life, the actual human rights of women and children and men, in those areas, or they need to be thrown out. And so, I think that is really this re-colonization by mega-mega-supernational corporations. Phillip Babich: Now, briefly, could you tell us about HOPE for Africa bill. Laura Livoti: The HOPE Bill is really a very exciting development. It’s designed to be pro-active -- that means something we can fight for, progressive agenda. And, as you know, we’ve been battling free trade bills for about five years now, maybe six years. And we’ve always been saying, "No. No, we don’t want this bill. No, this is a bad bill. No, this is going to hurt U.S. workers. No, this is going to hurt workers in other countries." But we’ve never had something to say, "Yes, this is what we want." And so the HOPE for Africa Bill is designed to be exactly that. It was born out of international dialogue between a wide array of groups, including African rights groups here, church groups, and labor groups, environmental groups, and groups in Africa, African NGOs. And out of it came this idea for what we would like to see codified into law in terms of U.S.-Africa trade and investment relations. You made reference to the fact that there are a lot of poor countries in Africa, and I just wanted to say that of the 33 of the 41 countries that have been designated highly indebted poor countries are all found on the continent of Africa. And in addition I wanted to touch on the point of the Globalist perspective that you referred to. Just to say that I think there may be two competing versions of Globalization. One is so dominant that we don’t see the other. And the dominant one is, of course, what’s codified by the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. That’s the corporate driven version. But I think there is a grass-roots version as well, that’s represented by things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which demands economic Human Rights, and the International Labor Organization, with the ILO accords, the UN- Ethel Long-Scott: I guess the United Nations was talking about that we have 89 countries, whole countries, that are worse off now than they were a decade ago. And the concentration of wealth from this tremendous globalization of capitalism is phenomenal. We’ve got 358 billionaires on the planet that have more assets than countries that have more than 45 percent of the population. So I would certainly agree with you that the issue is now that international grouping of have nots that is growing. There are huge structural changes, we see them in the downsizing of our population who no longer have work, or through the austerity measures to cut delivery of human services. It’s been going on for at least two decades in this country. These most destitute countries like Mexico and throughout South America, they have faced this first, and they unfortunately have some real perils that they hold before us, and I agree with you that on an international level we have to reshape this thing. So there’s a new class of poor on the globe that’s being created, because they are being structured out of work forever. Laura Livoti: I think what you’re calling into question there is the whole notion of "development," and I think that’s a very important thing to question. What kind of development is it, if people’s lives are actually getting worse? And I want to just tell a little story. I was in Mali for a month, and I lived with a family, in a family compound of about 25 people. And during the time that I lived there, 3 people came down with malaria. Now, malaria doesn’t have to happen. If the sewers were closed, there would be no malaria. But the sewers are open there. Now, if the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act passes, there is going to be no incentive to close those sewers. No corporation is going to look to do that, because there’s no profit to be made by closing sewers. It meets a real human need, but there’s no profit in it. And if we were to retake the notion of development back, we would be talking about how we meet real human needs. And with the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, not only does it pave the way for corporations to come in, who don’t have the incentive to close the sewers, but there’s also the fact that the government will have less money, because the government is being forced, for one, to repay the crushing debt that it owes, and two, the requirement for privatization, as I referred to before, means the government has less money to do any kind of infrastructure. Ethel Long-Scott: I think you raise an incredibly important point here. I think that if there’s one feature of the bill that, as I understand it, will be to facilitate the cancellation of debt. And I think this is an incredibly important piece that has emanated from the African countries. But actually not only the African countries, but other countries that have been sort of lured into the only way they can get dollars was to get these tremendous loans at incredible rates, so they can have some infusion into their countries. But clearly, the banks and the investors have made their profits several times over at the expense of the public. You know, I think that we should be reminded that there is a precedent in America for forgiving a debt. We had recently with debacle around the Savings and Loans. That debt, those loans were forgiven, and those investors made their money several times over. This was on the backs of American people. But certainly, in this instance, the banks can write off losses, and women and children and the destitute can have clean water, possibly have the luxury of an extra meal... Laura Livoti: I think one of the things that you keep raising is this is bigger than Africa and I think you’re absolutely right. That the free trade model has been applied all over the globe, and economic austerity measures have been applied all over the globe, and all over the globe countries are overly indebted. I think that what we’re doing with the proactive, progressive agenda with the HOPE Act is to create a model, another model that people in other parts of the world can pick up and say, "Oh, look at this. This has been done, there’s some good work here, and we can replicate this." It’s true that the sub-Saharan African nations have 230 billion dollars in external debt, and that represents approximately 20 percent of the foreign export earnings of the sub-Saharan African nations, if you exclude South Africa, which is a kind of a special case. Now, in the past, if we look back to post-World War II, the U.S. was at that time demanding that Germany pay the equivalent of 10 percent of it’s foreign export earnings. And at the time, it was realized that that would create economic instability, and economic instability would lead to social instability. So, a compromise was reached, and there was a cap that was instituted. And it was said that Germany would have to pay back a maximum of 3.5 percent of its export earnings. The HOPE Act builds on that, and makes the cap 5 percent. Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries right now is paying 20 percent of it’s foreign export earnings towards debt. Other tenets of the Bill are that foreign corporations have to operate by the same standards in an African country as they do in their home country, and the enforcement mechanism for that is that their goods will not be allowed access to U.S. markets if they don’t operate by the equivalent environmental and labor standards. Ethel Long-Scott: In effect, using the economic boycott in reverse. I love it! Phillip Babich: You’re listening to Making Contact, and we’re going to break for a minute. You’re listening to the voices of Ethel Long-Scott, the executive director of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project. And joining her in this discussion is Laura Livoti, she is our managing director, and she’s also with the organization Economic Justice Now. We’ll be back in a few moments. Shereen Meraji: If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, or you would like to learn how you can get involved with Making Contact, please give us a call. It’s toll free: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcript orders. We also welcome comments and suggestions for future programs. Phillip Babich: Before we return to our discussion on U.S. trade policy in Africa, we’re first going to hear from Lynn Wanyeki. She's with EcoNews Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya. Wanyeki spoke with Making Contact’s Peggy Law about the impact privatization policies have had on women in Africa. Lynn Wanyeki: Our health has gone dramatically down. We’re all involved in the structural adjustment programs, and enhanced structural adjustment programs, and really the point of all this is to cut down on social service spending. Not that social service spending has ever been terribly effective in our region, but there are ways to strengthen it and to streamline it, and to make it more effective, that don’t entail massive cuts. There is talk about privatization as being the "salvation for Africa." And if we look at who is really benefiting from privatization, it’s certainly not women. Certainly not women. I think the whole privatization processes have been huge cash cows for basically the ruling party people who, for that reason, are prepared to negotiate away our future. And women are the people without access to credit. They have no means of buying into any privatization schemes that might be a benefit to them, and that’s another area. So women are getting more and more marginalized from the mainstream economy, more and more forced into the informal sector, which doesn’t offer much possibility for sustainable living. Peggy Law: And are women understanding this. Do the women understand the impact of the global economy on their lives enough to be able to be major players in organizing and resistance. Lynn Wanyeki: Certainly women in the labor unions and the labor movement were the first to really understand the impacts of privatization and structural adjustment. And women especially working in the export processing zones. No labor law applies. The majority of women who work there are women between the ages of 17 and 25. And so the unions were actually very good in picking that up. In terms of the mainstreams women’s movement the focus for a long time has been just on the whole in bringing the private to the public. Looking at using mainstream human rights language around civil and political rights to cater for concerns about violence against women. And that really has been where the energy has been for a long time. Now that that has achieved some success, women are certainly very much involved in looking at the whole area of economic, social and cultural rights, and looking at the macroeconomics from that perspective. How do you mainstream gender in that domain of rights? And how do you then use that as a platform for which to fight what they see is happening to actual incomes. Phillip Babich: Lynn Wanyeki of EcoNews in Nairobi speaking with Peggy Law. We now return to our discussion with Ethel Long-Scott and Laura Livoti about U.S. trade policy and Africa. Long-Scott begins by comparing cuts in social spending here in the United States with austerity measures that would be imposed on African countries if the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act passes. Ethel Long-Scott: I think it’s important to remember that President Clinton, he led the Welfare Reform, really Elimination, Act, and that’s an austerity measure, because the reality is, it’s no reform, it takes programs away for working and poor people. And in reality, it also facilitated a tremendous privatization of the delivery of human services. And that process is only beginning. It’s so big, most of us don’t understand the impact from child care delivery, to social service delivery, to food, for housing...it is profound on so many different levels. It sets to threaten the impact of labor negotiations that have taken decades to get in place. I think that’s the other reason that this model that Laura spoke about, really pulls together labor, working poor, small business efforts, efforts for micro-lending, that the Hope bill represents, is a really important piece. But we are seeing the impact on a national level, our inner cities, our rural areas, are being decimated. And it’s primarily because what is at the forefront is what benefits global capitalism at the expense of the working people. We have a whole new class of poor people that have been created as a part of this. And I think we have the ability to feed, clothe and house every man, woman, and child on the planet. But, you know, we’ve got to put the needs of people first in that. So that’s a different kind of vision, and I think what it does, it really welds together that we have much more in common with those brothers and sisters six thousand and nine thousand miles apart from us, than we do with Mr. Gates and others. Phillip Babich: Now, you work with low income women on a daily basis. I wonder if you could paint us a picture of what poverty looks like in the United States? Ethel Long-Scott: We have an increasing population of homeless -- that used to be a word that didn’t exist except for when you referred to foreign countries. We have at least 6 to 12 million Americans who are homeless. When I say those numbers, we are looking at possibly people who sleep from couch to couch. We have gone from the industrial manufacturing section to production that is driven by microchips and robots, and that’s not bad. It’s a question of who owns them and what are the purposes for them. So, the increasing face of poverty in our country is women and children. And one of the things that’s interesting about the so-called Welfare Reforms -- really Welfare Elimination -- is that it really has put tremendous hardship on already poor families and working poor. People are either piecing together a series of minimum wage jobs, or they are going without. There are time limits that are going to cap families, that essentially says, if they haven’t got their act together in X amount of time, they’ll be on the streets. So we’re facing a great deal more stress and hardship, much more abject poverty, and this is compounded with already drastic environmental conditions. There is a budding social upheaval to that. Some people call it social revolution. Some others are looking at it as a human rights revolution, if you will, an economic human rights revolution. That’s taken a much larger forum, and we’re really proud that it’s hooking up more and more with brothers and sisters throughout our continent, and across the world. So it’s a really important movement. And we’ve got people right here in our own...on the shores of this country whose homes are caves, and garbage huts, and living underneath bridges. And so, right away our economic well being, economic security, becomes a bridge that is over-arching, that we can and must provide for the majority of our country. We are going to have to put that program forward. That’s taken a lot of different forms from different political parties that are beginning to develop working people’s parties that we haven’t had before in our country. It’s tremendously encouraging. Parties of the Greens and others who are raising important challenges to how things are going, and saying, "We don’t have to live like this." Now, that’s resonating, you know, it doesn’t take rocket science, but what we have to do is begin to build the confidence that we deserve something better, and that we are going to have to frame it. It’s not going to come out of Congress, because most of these people are bought and sold by the powers that be in our country -- and internationally, as I’ve been talking about here. And so we are really going to have to reframe, even as we talk about participation in the electoral process, that we will approach this in a different kind of way from the standpoint that only by uplifting the most destitute amongst us, can we talk about really eradicating and having a better situation for the majority of our society. Phillip Babich: I’d like to shift this conversation back to what’s going on in Africa, and what corporate involvement actually looks like now in Africa without legislation that essentially codifies corporate interest in Africa. Laura, you’ve been in Africa, you’ve followed a lot of issues there. Tell us a few examples of what corporate interest look like in Africa these days. Laura Livoti: Well, I think probably some of the most well-known examples come from Nigeria, where Shell Oil has been pumping out of the delta billions of barrels of crude oil. And they love that crude oil, because it’s so pure that they have to do less refining with it. But Nigeria is governed by a military dictatorship, and the military has decreed that the federal government owns the land and all the resources in the land. So the people who live in that region do not see any benefit of the oil that’s being pumped out of their land. And in fact, what they have experienced is negative. Their lands have been poisoned. Shell doesn’t operate by the same standards that it does in the United States. There are leaks in their pipes, there’s rusty equipment, there’s old equipment. When the community might call and say, "Hey, there’s a leak," it might take them weeks to get out and fix it, and they they’ll blame it on community sabotage. The air is thick with the smell of oil. They burn off what they call the liquid gas. They just light it on fire and there’s permanent huge torches burning in the land. Some people have never seen a night that’s dark in the Niger delta. These kinds of things couldn’t happen here. You know, we have higher labor and environment standards that wouldn’t allow the kind of pollution and the kind of activity that’s going on there to take place. And there’s collusion between Shell and the military government, such that when people begin to protest, the military government will come in with guns, weapons, and massacre and repress. The jail system isn’t the same as it is here, and there’s torture that goes on in the jails. So any activist who goes to jail can expect to be tortured. That’s considered routine. Chevron operates the same way. The supporters of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the bill being pushed by Clinton and Rangall, or the NAFTA for Africa, include organizations like Chevron, Mobil, Enron, Caterpillar, GE, K-Mart, Occidental Petroleum. I think it’s very clear that these multi-nationals and these oil interests support this bill because it will enable them to continue to extract with maximum profit. If you have to watch out for labor standards, if you have to put in some environmental safeguards, it takes away from the total profit that they can make. Ethel Long-Scott: They are orchestrating new sets of laws that essentially suspend environmental concerns, suspend if not decimate existing labor negotiations and the recognitions of labor unions as an autonomous and important representation for workers, and, of course, a growing attack on basic democratic rights. I know that our brothers and sisters outside of the shores of this country have a much better discussion about international economics and indeed the role that our country tromps on and plays in their lives. We’re trying to bring that up to speed. I’m encouraged by the fact that we are recognizing that we have two parties that represent one class of the wealthy. We need a party that represents working people, and that effort is under way in our country. But much more must be done. Phillip Babich: On that point, we’ll have to leave that discussion right there. If listeners want more information, we’ll be giving out a toll free number at the very end of this broadcast, so you might want to grab a pen to write with. This has been a special round table edition of Making Contact. We’ve been talking about trade policy in Africa. Joining us to discuss that issue were Ethel Long-Scott, she’s the executive director of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project. Ethel, thanks for joining us. Ethel Long-Scott: I’m delighted and honored. Phillip Babich: Great. Thanks you. And our managing director, Laura Livoti, who’s also with the organization Economic Justice Now. Laura thanks so much. Laura Livoti: Thank you. Phillip Babich: You can reach Economic Justice Now by calling 510-464-5921. And the Women’s Economic Agenda Project is at 510-451-7379. And that’s it for this edition of Making Contact: U.S. Trade Policy in Africa. And special thanks this week to Stephanie Welch and Courtney Malone for production assistance. I’m Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. Making Contact is an independent production. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we’d like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. ‘Bye for now. |