Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Amid famine, floods, earth quakes, and political crisis…

The MINISTERS Arrive

Will They Act?

By: Ida Bergstrøm, Stakeholder Forum

Can they act? We are not certain. Neither, probably, are they.

The sentiments have been echoed time and again in this session’s Outreach Issues, in the plenaries, and during side events, to the point at which the repetition sucks the statements dry. There is a food crisis, do something! People are rioting, do something! People are dying, do something! What an opportunity, that we should be discussing agriculture in a time of agricultural chaos! This is the time, if there ever was one, for the CSD to firmly place itself on the map.

And still we continue to smoke in the Vienna Café. And, yes, this is related. The smoking in the Vienna Café reveals heaps about the nature of human beings, in this case the ones who work at the UN, debating how to solve the world’s most pressing issues at various conferences. I suppose it might have been symbolic, as I haven’t seen her wear it again -- or worse, maybe she was told by supervisors that she was not allowed -- but the first Monday of the CSD, one of the café workers wore an air filter over her mouth and nose. I recognize her from when I was here at CSD 13. We are not on US ground at the UN, so we can smoke. Okay. But does that mean we don’t care about this woman being exposed to our poisonous cigarettes, or whether she contracts cancer from it, so we continue to smoke in her face?

It boils down to ethics. Values. An area regarding which we clearly -- the world and the CSD within it -- are rather hypocritical. Do as I say, not as I do. Of course not everybody at the UN smokes at the Vienna Café. But what does it say about us that we are not able to collectively agree that we should show basic consideration for others’ health and refrain from it? During CSD 13 there were actually no smoking signs on the walls in the café. The year after, they were gone. Defeat.

One of my colleagues said yesterday that he doesn’t believe wealthy nations will stop consuming until the effects of it literally hits them in the face. I don’t want to, but I am inclined to agree.

The thing is, I really don’t think I personally will stop consuming until I am forced to do so. Of course, we do have a choice. Let nature enforce the rules, or do so ourselves. And this is where the ministers are so important. I am all about grassroots, but governments and intergovernmental organisations like the UN set the frameworks within which we operate. Globalisation and the so-called global economy are not forces of nature. They are man made and human controlled systems. We created them, we could potentially change them. If we want to. If we all agree.

I’d much rather not own ten cheap dresses from a cheap fashion shop. I’d much rather the person who made the dress, dyed the fabric, made the buttons, the zip, the thread, got paid a decent wage so they could live a decent life.

Our current global economy fundamentally rests on the exploitation of labour and resources, to the enrichment of few and the detriment of many. There is nothing natural about this, it is the result of historically created and sustained unequal world systems. That we can change.

Economic growth is touted as the be all and end all of development, yet it in no way ensures equality or quality of life. Let alone sustainability. It is in fact rather absurd to be discussing the concept of sustainable development, and the current food crisis, and not discuss better and different regulation of the global economy.

What I’m asking, or wait, I think it’s time to implore, is for somebody -- for the ministers, for the CSD, for my government -- to force me to change my unsustainable ways.

Of course, by now the economist and the realist is rolling his or her eyes, patting me on the head and dismissing my argument. An ingrained system is not easily challenged. And so we continue to talk about symptoms, not causes. And thus end up sustaining the inequalities we in fact create ourselves.

Meanwhile, the numbers of dead people due to earth quakes, floods, and a completely unnecessary food crisis rise.