Haiti is an object lesson in how chronic aid – as opposed to emergency aid in reaction to a disaster – can lay waste to a developing economy. For decades, rice imports subsidised by the US government and well-meaning gifts of clothing undermined what should have been two of the country’s biggest industries: agriculture and textiles. The result is a junkie nation, dependent on outside help.
There are going to be a lot more Haitis around in future, thanks to the agreement reached at the UN climate talks in Lima. Developing countries have for the first time agreed in principle to curtail their carbon emissions – in return for payments from western governments towards ‘ambitious mitigation and adaptation actions’.
Strip away the jargon and it amounts to a governmental version of the carbon offset schemes which jet-setting celebrities use to help them feel good about themselves. They don’t want to compromise their own lifestyles, so every time they fly they try to buy their way out of their sin by paying a third world peasant to reduce his carbon emissions instead. To take one example, delegates at the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles were given a certificate to say the carbon emissions from their flights had been offset by a scheme to insulate the roofs of huts in a South African township.
This only works so long as the recipients of the offsetting remain living in a state of poverty. Should they in future demolish their huts and build more substantial – and more energy-hungry — homes such as those that most people in the West take for granted – the offsetting will be lost.
Thanks to Lima, whole Western nations will now be trying to offset their emissions by showering developing countries with green aid. No-one seems to care that much of this aid will inevitably undermine local industries and hint development. That, after all, is the aim: the West wants the developing world to remain in a primitive state so that Western lifestyles can be retained while keeping a lid on global carbon emissions.
When Western government try to impose carbon reduction targets on the developing world they ought to remember one thing: that many of the fast-rising carbon emissions in places like China and Malaysia are spewed out in the name of producing manufactured goods for western markets. Here is a sobering statistic which ought to be recited before all global climate talks. Ministers like to pat themselves on the back for reducing UK carbon emissions, which fell by 14 per cent between 1990 and 2008. However, if you calculate carbon emissions on a consumption basis – in other words you include emissions from manufacture of goods produced overseas and bought by western consumer – UK emissions actually rose by 20 per cent over that period. This evidence, calculated by the Public Interest Research Centre, was presented to the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee in 2011.
It isn’t just manufacturing which has been outsourced to the developing world; it is our carbon emissions, too.
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