Free Trade and GATT

The most recent round of GATT is a significant one in which, as the Chairman remarked, a "systematic attempt is being made to force the poor to be free". The United States has, I believe - I did not read it in the papers, though - announced this morning that if any country falls to respond, the developed nations, especially the United States will blackmail you by the process of trade sanctions, and even resort to unilateral legislation as in the case of Super and Special 301.

I think this is a very significant development. I like the term "systematic attempt to force the poor to be free". Although I am not an expert on GATT and have not been following it all that closely for the last year or so, I am in close touch with the Third World Network in Penang, as well as with Martin Khor. They have actually set up an office in Geneva called "SUNS", that is run by an Indian called Raghavan, which provides a day to day summary of discussions and events, and a whole magazine dealing with the issues. This is an extremely important function as many of the delegates from the smaller Third World countries do not have the means to deal with the fearful bludgeoning they are receiving mainly from the American delegation.

The American delegation actually consists of a whole host of lawyers and experts, and the Third World delegates are having a great deal of difficulty in resisting these treaties. They are all the time being cajoled and even bribed - they are being given all, sorts of small term advantages - to accept these long term arrangements. A year ago we devoted a whole issue of our magazine The Ecologist to this issue of GATT. The most useful thing to do is to look at its implications, its philosophy in the long term, that is, in the general context.

I think the widest context in which it can be understood is in the context of development - economic development - and the whole issue of trade. We all assume that trade is a good thing, and that more trade is going to increase our welfare. That is a basic assumption which no one questions. We also generally accept that development is a good thing, and of course trade plays a very important part in economic development.

This idea that economic development is a panacea to all our problems is of fairly recent origin, usually attributed to Harry Truman, traced to after the war when someone decided that trade would solve all our problems - or rather, that development would solve all our problems. During the colonial period there was no specific effort to develop the colonies, because the colonies would then be seen as competing with the mother country. So colonies were not encouraged to develop. I don't have to tell you, in India, how it all worked.

Suddenly, all this changed alter the war. We can see the effect of development on traditional societies, that is, tribal, archaic and peasant societies. This aspect is generally ignored in any discussion of economics. We assume that the experience of the last 150 years - the industrial experience - is the only relevant experience. This means that the main body of economists decree in what I take to be the most presumptuous manner possible, that the whole economic experience of man on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years is irrelevant - totally irrelevant - to the understanding and solution of the problems that confront us today.

The person who first questioned this dogma was Karl Polanyi, a bit of a hero of mine - and he has become a hero of a lot of people very recently, I might add. He was a Hungarian who came to Victorian England. He had a look at the so called 'archaic societies', peasant societies, and decided that the entire set up of laws that economists had formulated, supposedly of universal application, do not apply to those tribal, peasant and archaic societies in which Homo economicus is conspicuous by his absence. Nothing in these societies was done to maximise the return on factors of production, to increase the availability of material goods. Things were not done to satisfy economic motives. This was the most important thing.

Polanyi noticed this, and since then there has been massive literature on the subject and he has been attacked by some people. I think it is tremendously important to see that man did not always judge his wealth in terms of possession of material goods or money. Traditional money in tribal societies satisfied its social goals - it was basically under social control.

In India you must know this, because in traditional Indian villages the relations between the different castes were established by traditional roles - where the farmer provided food for the barber, the potter, or the smith. He provided food at a rate established by tradition, and obtained goods and services provided by the artisans in return.

Now, it is important to understand what would happen if the potter, say, were a drunk, and made very poor pots, and if there were a potter in the neighbouring village who made good large pots. The farmer would still buy pots from his potter, because to him the maintenance of social bonds within the village was more important than the size or quality of the pots. It did not matter whether the pots were big or small; what mattered was a coherent, cohesive, considerate society that hangs together, a proper society.

In the west we are only beginning to realise the consequence of destroying society. I am quite convinced that within the next ten years, the west will go the way of Russia. The collapse will be just as bad, probably worse, as America is more centralised, more dependant on high technology, and on the working of the market system, all of which are highly precarious and very vulnerable to disruptions.

One of the reasons why America must collapse is because its society is gone, it no longer exists. If you go to New York and the other major cities there is a complete breakdown of community and the family. The same is happening in England, a massive increase in delinquency, crime, drug addiction - society has totally collapsed. I do not think it is possible to govern a society that has collapsed in this way.

We are all going to Rio de Janeiro in June where there is to be this big meeting with 25,000 people. In order for this United Nations Conference on Environment and Development to take place they are going to have to clear the streets of some 7,000 abandoned children of Rio and other big cities. They are going to shoot them to get them out of the way as they interfere with tourism. They are going to have to shoot God knows how many thousands of children just to make this meeting on Environment and Development possible. That is a most horrific thought. You have this situation with 30 million abandoned children on the streets of South American cities - that will probably be 100 million by the turn of the century at current trends. It is a breakdown, a complete, total breakdown.

Here in India, you probably understood the overwhelming importance of maintaining social cohesiveness. Traditional man knew this, and therefore his economic activities were closely subordinated to social imperatives, if you look further back. In tribal societies, as Polanyi points out, goods were not distributed. The markets were something that did not really occur in the village in the sense that we have it - haggling.

The first thing in the market system is a transaction which in itself calls up no long term personal relationship which is therefore to be exploited to as great a degree as possible. In fact the presence of a previous relationship hinders a good market. People do not like to sell to a kinsman as it is bad form to demand as high a price from a kinsman as one might from a stranger. Market behaviour and kinship behaviour are incompatible. Therefore, the market system and the kinship system are totally incompatible within a single relationship, and the individual must give way to one or the other.

So, within a traditional village society, you did not have a market system - there were market activities, but they dealt mainly with villages around, where you could haggle. If you haggled and sold without taking social necessities into account then you dealt mainly in superfluous commodities, not necessities as Polanyi pointed out.

For Polanyi, a great disaster came with the development of the market system in Europe in the 13th century. For him, the worst thing was that suddenly labour and land became commodities. He points out that labour is another word for human life, which means that human life became an article to buy and sell, which clearly it was not designed to be. Land is another word for nature, which means you could buy and sell nature. Thus, human life and nature became commodities to be bought and sold.

So, the way human life and nature were used and developed was determined not by any moral, social or ecological factors, but by purely market factors. This is something of which one must realise the implications - things are done simply because it is economic to do so.

• It is economic, at the moment, to do most of the things that are leading to the destruction of the planet. It is very economical to cut down the world's forests, which is why they are being cut down, very economical indeed.
• It is economic to force people in the Third World to buy tobacco in very large quantities.
• It is also economic to use all sorts of hormones in beef to produce the devitalising and contaminated food we feed to people in England and America. That is why there is a ten year gap in life expectancy between the working classes and the middle classes in England. It is largely the result of this disgusting diet that we force on people because it is economical to feed them on this diet.

It is economic, in fact, to do just about all the things that are undesirable on social, moral and ecological grounds. It is economic to burn fossil fuels which are slowly changing the climate, and to produce CFC's which are destroying the ozone layer so rapidly. Du Pont is producing half the world's CFC's which are destroying the ozone layer. The World Bank tells us that there are 40 million people alive today who will get skin cancer in the near future because of this, and many more whose immune-system functioning will be destroyed.

Why is this happening? It's happening because it is economic for us to produce these CFC's. When governments try to ban and phase out CFC's quickly, you get this tremendous lobbying by Du Pont, ICI, Hoechst and all the other giants of the chemical industry to move slowly as was decided in the Montreal Protocol. It brings them a profit of about 40 million pounds - a very small amount when you think of the destruction that is being caused.

So when you allow the market to decide our fate, you are actually saying that economic considerations must decide our fate. Then there is nothing to stop us from destroying our planet. It is happening very, very quickly indeed.

In my opinion, the only hope we have if we were going to keep this planet more or less habitable is to do precisely the opposite - to make sure our economic activities are ruthlessly and systematically subordinated to social, ecological and climatic considerations. I do not think we have any alternative to doing this.

I have talked about trade, not about development. What is development? If you look around the world today, at the moment what is it that the Third World has to sell? The pattern for the last 50 years is for them to sell what they have - natural resources. If you suddenly industrialise Papua New Guinea, it is not going to be able to sell computers to compete with IBM, or jets that compete with Boeing. It is going to sell what it has - its forests. You can see that development is simply selling off what you have to sell - turning it into cash.

Take New Zealand, for example. It is not usually thought of as a Third World country, but it only started developing, maybe, a century ago. Its development pattern is interesting because what they did was to simply, systematically, sell off everything they had - cash them in.

• They started by cashing in their whale population, and that went. That is called developing a resource. Once a resource is gone, it is "developed".
• They then cashed in their seal population, and soon there were no seals left.
• So, they looked around for something else to cash in and they found they had things called Kauri Pines, wonderful trees with beautiful soft yellow wood which makes the best boats. They were cashed in, three million acres of them, and now there is only a small relic forest left.
• Finally, they had nothing left but their bare land, so they put sheep on it. Of course, the erosion in the hills is something unbelievable. Soon there will be no soil left at all.
• Then they found they had cray fish, so they cashed in their cray fish population.

So you cash in everything and sell it off. Eventually you have nothing left - you end up with a desert - that is the outcome of what, in a nutshell, is development - the creation of deserts on a massive scale. This country is becoming a desert too. I am sure you are all familiar with the writings of B. B. Vohra. In 1973 he published his document A Charter for the Land in which he showed the terrible state of your land in this country. 60 percent of your land in this country is being badly eroded and nothing is being done about it. Why has this charter for the land not been implemented? Because it is not in the short-term interests of those who determine our destiny. This is happening everywhere.

Now, development is also another process. It involves removing functions which were fulfilled at a family and community level and transferring them to the level of an institution or a corporation. This must be clear in India, where you still have communities that are almost self-sufficient, where most of the functions are fulfilled at that level.

In a normal tribal society, the society will fulfil all the functions of bringing up the children, looking after the old, and even generating its own religion. It does not need a distant bureaucracy to give it a religion. It governs itself: This is what Mahatma Gandhi saw as being the ideal, a republic of independent villages, organised into looser associations at state and provincial levels. When you develop, you must systematically take away these functions from the village for the very good reason that within the context of the village these functions are not monetised - they do not produce any GNP.

Ten years ago, a friend of mine showed me a slide show of Bhutan. I saw wonderful, huge forests, beautiful rivers, and people enjoying these most massive, colossal feasts you are ever likely to see. My friend asked me to estimate what I thought of Bhutan's GNP. I said about 2,000 dollars or so, and he replied, "No, Zero. Bhutan has no GNP". So that is why the country is so prosperous. All the functions are fulfilled better at the level of the family and the community. A mother can look after her baby better than any crèche. She can feed her children much better herself. After all, mother's milk is healthier than anything Nestle can provide.

But as you develop, these functions are necessarily taken over. Nestlé feeds the children. These functions are monetised. You could double GNP overnight if you passed a new law stating that no woman can look after her own children. She can only look after her neighbour's children for a fee. Overnight every mother will have a salary, so you could double GNP. But the consequence will be that the children will be undisciplined and extremely badly brought up. There will be a massive increase in delinquency and drug addiction as there is in America.

This systematic removal of functions has become so vast. In England and America we no longer grow our own food. People actually buy readymade food from a delicatessen or eat out at a fast food restaurant. The family, the community, no longer has a function at all, they have become redundant, they atrophy just like unused muscles. What do you do by developing in this manner? You marginalise your society. It has no functions.

If you modernise agriculture then small farmers cease to exist, and it is taken over by a few giant corporations. In America, in Illinois, 500 acre farmers are considered small scale. They cannot survive. They are all going bankrupt. I spoke to some of them, and most of them are either broke or about to go under, and the few who are still producing are going to be taken over by giant corporations farming enormous areas, using all sorts of futuristic devices - lasers, beamers, helicopters, all done by computers. It is madness; folly on a massive scale.

I reckon one of the worst problems we face and one of the worst problems India faces is the massive explosion of slums. The Delhi Planning Authority estimates that 55 percent of the people in Delhi live in slums and that it is likely to be 80 percent by the end of the century. The situation is the same in Bombay and in all the other large cities in India. You are not alone; it is going to be the same everywhere.

Within the next 15 to 20 years, 50 percent of humanity is going to be living in slums. That is reason enough for banning the whole development adventure. These are people who are marginalised, their functions have been removed. They can no longer produce their own food. The dyers, the weavers, spinners and others no longer exist. They have been pushed out by Lancashire and the whole industrialised world, including the mills of Ahmedabad. Natural resources are removed from them by corporations that have taken over their work. The corporations that have taken over do so, on a very big scale. They will use very much more energy and resource intensive methods. They cause much more pollution, need much more resources.

So, the water is taken away from the remaining village people for large water development schemes, or for providing water to the big cities. Their trees are cut down and hence the water table falls, their top soil goes, they have to leave their area which has become uninhabitable, and move to the cities. So this is the general trend, the inevitable consequence of this development process.

For me, GATT is basically a continuation and acceleration of this process. Development, of course, started in 1944 with the Bretton Woods Conference, and, of course, their first aim was to rebuild the shattered economy of Western Europe. The second aim was to expand the western economy into the Third World, to provide a market for western products, show a perpetual expansion, to exploit a source of cheap materials and cheap labour. This is explicitly stated in the GATT document. That is the purpose of the enterprise. For the industrialists behind GATT the Third World is a market and a source of cheap labour and natural resources. In recent years it has become a sink for their surplus capital.

After 1973, when everybody was worried that all the money in the world ended up with the Arabs, the money had to be recycled, quickly. So, private banks, the World Bank and the multinational banks had the task of recycling all this money into the Third World, particularly to Africa. The unbelievable destruction in Africa has largely been caused by these huge developmental schemes financed by this money which had to be pushed.

A friend of mine, Karl Ziegler, a banker, described what they were doing in Africa as "pushing money" - like a drug peddler 'pushes drugs'. In a sense that is what the World Bank does. Today it has 22 billion dollars to invest and it is going to push it. India is its best customer. India is also one of the few countries that pays its bills. Incidentally, the World Bank does not have bad debts. You cannot NOT repay the money to the World Bank, because then you get retaliated against by absolutely everybody.

So now the World Bank does 'debt management', which means it lends money to people to pay their debts so that it can keep its record. This pushing of money is unbelievable. You get a beautiful scheme like the Narmada Valley Project, so the World Bank rubs its hands and is not likely to forego that chance to push their money. All day long they look out for schemes to lend money to people: such schemes are very difficult to find these days. In fact, the World Bank today actually receives more money than it invests.

So, the object of enterprise is to provide a market. You must remember this is an objective of colonialism. It has not changed. To quote the editorial in the GATT issue of The Ecologist, Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, said back in the 19th century:

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials, and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies will also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories."

From this point of view, the foundation of a colony is the creation of a market. That is why American businessmen are pushing this whole thing of Free Trade. The President of the United States Business Conference said that American businessmen saw a strengthening of GATT as the single best way to create an environment to expand their international success.

The success of the Uruguay Round is a quantum leap in the economic colonialism of the last century - and Free Trade is not only in goods but services, where tariffs are no longer accepted. Services, in fact, are critical because, world wide, it is the economic sector which is increasing the fastest.

Now, consider a small country like Papua New Guinea, or New Zealand, a weak country which really takes this Free Trade propaganda seriously. In Time magazine there is an interesting article, "Feeling Fleeced", about New Zealand. They have made everything free out there. The result is that the country is on the verge of collapse. One in four manufacturing jobs has disappeared. What chance does a small manufacturing company have against the Japanese, the Taiwanese and the Americans? None at all. They have gone bankrupt. It is the most shamefaced colonialism that the world has seen.

That is not all. There are investments, imports, intellectual properties, TRIPS and TRIMS. Countries shall no longer be allowed to refuse foreign investments on any ground. They all have to pay all these extra taxes - royalties - on patents.

We can see even the patenting of seeds. This is tremendously important in this area. The seed companies have all been brought by the large agro-chemical or oil companies. They are now developing, in their laboratories, all sorts of new hybrids, genetically engineered seeds amongst other things. These seeds are bred to function with the pesticides and fertilisers they sell, as part of a package. These seeds, while they are fertile, are not stable and have to be bought every year.

So the farmer who has for thousands of years put aside his seed for the next year's planting, can no longer do so. He has to buy seeds from the seed company every year, and these seeds require pesticides and fertilisers. As you know the Green Revolution seeds are very sensitive to fertiliser application, whereas the traditional seeds in India are not at all sensitive and produce very high yields as Dr. Richharia of Bhopal has been at pains to point out for decades. As a result of all this, the developing countries will have to pay between 60 to 100 billion dollars extra every year to the industrial world.

It is difficult to see the advantage of this Free Trade, the 'level playing field' where everyone competes on an equal footing. The last thing I would want, if I were to meet Mr. Mike Tyson, the world heavy weight boxing champion, is a level of playing field! Countries that are not advanced economically have no chance, they are finished.

This whole GATT enterprise is to create a world-wide Free Trade Zone. They want to create a world in which corporations can do exactly what they want in which there are no longer social constraints of any kind. It does not matter if their activities destroy communities. That is what Free Trade is all about. Not freedom for the people to do what they want, but freedom for the corporations to do anything; freedom to pollute; freedom to destroy the sources; freedom to destroy communities, use up their functions, marginalise them and push them into slums; freedom to build Narmada and Tehri dams; freedom to go on destroying the ozone layer; freedom to change and destabilise the climate so that it becomes uninhabitable to humans and other living things - that is the sort of freedom that GATT is trying to obtain for itself - and what we need is the exact opposite.

If we want to survive on this planet we need massively to reduce the impact of our activities on an environment that is ever less capable of supporting us. To do that, is to reduce the scale of our activities, to return to the village and small communities that Mahatma Gandhi talked about, to conduct our activities at that level and to cater, not for a world market, but for a village market: at most regional markets. If we have a future on this planet that is the only possible scenario for us. And to get there we need to move in exactly the opposite direction to the one we are being enticed to move in.

Questions and answers

Do you really think that the role played by development, literacy for example in reaching the goal of greater life expectancy, providing drinking water or in reducing infant mortality, has been undesirable?

I fail to understand why literacy is such a big deal. The trouble is we identify education with western education. We totally ignore traditional educational systems. Yet even the most primitive tribes - in the south of Tanzania there is a tribe called Hadsa who are considered highly primitive. They have a vocabulary of over 10,000 words - and we have trouble using 20!

Most of the population in England read only the Sun, the Star and the Mirror. You read these papers, they are filled, with sex scandals; pictures of all sorts of violence. There is nothing else. Is there anything worth reading in that at all? What is the point of all this literacy?

I recommend to you a book by Ananda Coomaraswamy called The Bugbear of Literacy. What is to be gained by literacy, I fail to see. Looking at the shelves of book shops today I would have thought it was counter productive to know how to read all that. Your traditional systems of education which did not involve literacy is much more superior in many ways to our western education.

As far as drinking water is concerned, in my view, development has had the opposite effect. We are now moving to a situation, as a result of development, in which drinking water is going to be increasingly difficult to find world wide. Between 35 to 40 percent of irrigation in America uses water which is mined, non-renewable water. All the industry in the south-west of America, and their irrigated agriculture is based on the use of a single aquifer, the Ogallala aquifer, which is very quickly being destroyed.

Throughout the Third World - look at the case of India - you find that the local communities have increasing difficulties in finding water because water is being siphoned away by large plantations and export orientated enterprises. Water is becoming a massive problem also because of the growth of eucalyptus plantations which are being planted for rayon and pulp. You have got tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of problem villages in the country where they have no water at all, whereas they had water 40 years ago.

The availability of water is largely determined by forest cover. In South-West Africa the destruction of forests has led to chronic water problems in which people have had to dig wells further down every year. The world wide water shortages are the direct consequence of economic development. The International Water Decade's main function was to provide equipment for wells and tubes. But it did not do anything really to enable one to get more water.

Is it likely that we will reverse this trend of development? We might still be able to change or improve the situation through sustainable development.

It sounds very nice - sustainable development. But what is it? First of all, is such a thing possible? Is it possible to change indefinitely in one direction? There is no life process which does this. If economic or sustainable development involves increasing your impact on the environment, which it must do if you need to increase people's consumption, then it cannot be done because, I am afraid to say, we have to face the fact that our planet is already too heavily exploited.

Wherever you look you will see that land is over grazed: whether it is England, America, France, any country, the land is over grazed. Our croplands are over cropped; our wetlands are over drained; our seas are over fished. The impact of these activities everywhere is very much greater than the environment can support, whatever the environment is. So what is sustainable development going to do?

If you read the Brundtland Report which documents the problem reasonably well, it ends up by telling you that you have got to increase the rate of economic growth from 3.5 to 4.5 percent in Africa, and also in other countries. The Secretary General essentially tells us that we have got to increase world GNP by five to ten times before the world can become sustainable. When you read a thing like that, you no longer have too much confidence in the term sustainability.

Even the World Bank - Robert Goodman and Herman Daly - produced a document on sustainable development, in which the first article by Goodman tells us that the world has reached its limits. We cannot go any further, even if there is anything to be gained by going further. He points out that there is a study which shows that we are already using up 40 percent Net Primary Production (NPP), by photosynthesis on the terrestrial area, that is 25 percent of the whole. If we double GNP we will be using 80 percent, and if we double it again we will be using 160 percent, at which point we need magicians, not industrialists, to go any further.

You cannot increase the impact any further; you have to reduce the impact. So we have to increase our welfare without increasing the impact which basically means returning to smaller scale societies. You may say it is very difficult to do that - it is, very difficult. But to go on in the present direction is not difficult, it is impossible.

How will you change the nature of man, reverse time?

I do not think you have to change the nature of man. Man has been around - or something that looks like man - for about three million years or so. He has only been an agriculturist for about 10,000 years, since the Neolithic revolution. He has only been an industrialist for 150 years, that also in a very limited part of the world, England, and a few other countries.

You cannot generalise about man, on the basis of 150 years in a history of three million. It is like locking a man up in a cupboard. Put a man about 70 or 80 years old in a cupboard, turn him upside down for two days, and then open the door and see what he is like. It is supposed to give an idea of how man normally is. It is not going to teach you the true nature of man because man was not designed to hang upside down in a cupboard for 48 hours.

This is what the industrial experience is. It is not a satisfactory sample of the experience of our species on this planet. And the sum is quite different. Man was designed to be part of a family. He needs a family, a community; he is naturally religious, he has a set of aesthetic needs, biological needs, social needs, spiritual needs. But he has done without these material goods, which play an enormous part in our lives today, until very recently. That is reason enough to suppose that Karl Polanyi was right, and that means that material needs are very relative. We need money today only because we need to buy our food. Before this we did not need money; people led very satisfactory lives without it.

So I do not think you need to change man's nature. On the contrary it is because of man's nature that we cannot accept the world we are creating. This is true. Watson, the Nobel laureate realised that people just did not like the world that science is creating and he actually stated that if man cannot adapt to the world science is creating then we have to change man. We will have to produce, by genetic engineering, a new type of robotic man who does not mind eating polluted food and drinking polluted water, and living without a family and a community in the most hideous industrial landscape. We will have to genetically engineer and change the nature of man if we are to continue in this direction.

All these problems are emanating from the developed rather than the developing countries?

What you have, said is a critical issue. It is precisely what the Third World delegates at the UNCED prepcom meetings are saying. They are saying that all these big problems are being created by you in the North, which is perfectly true, and therefore why should we do anything about it. You must do it. If we have to do something about it, we want to be paid to do it - to stop producing CFC's for instance. You must pay us to set up the new technologies to make refrigerators without CFC's. This has been the position of your Ministry of Environment, all your delegates and there is a lot in that. Most of my work has been aimed at England; the Blueprint for Survival was just that. We have got to change. We have got to decentralise our society and move back to smaller communities, conduct our economic activities at a smaller level. It is very much more important that we in the North should do this, than that you should do this.

Free Trade is not in the interest of the Third World countries and it is being pushed by us, or rather by the western corporations, you see, as a means of satisfying their requirements, not as a means of satisfying your requirement. I am not here to tell you what to do; I am here to tell you how I see these major issues at the moment. There are no arguments about the fact that we are creating the problems.

Living in village or tribal communities is not as idyllic as it sounds. There is a great deal of oppression in small communities too.

It is going to be very difficult to live again, in these sort of decentralised communities. Whenever I talk about tribes, it is pointed out to me that I am incapable of living in a tribe. Well, that is obviously true because I have not been brought up in a tribe. But my answer to that is I am degenerate, that I have been brought up in big cities and luxury resorts. My father used to run luxury hotels. I am a degenerate and I can only fit in a degenerate society. The society that I can fit into is not worth fitting into in the first place. It is really very difficult, but that does not mean one can argue against small communities.

You talk about the oppression within a community. There is tremendous public opinion which is very powerful in a community. It is so powerful that people do not dare divert from these traditional norms. It is very unpleasant for us, it is intolerable. We are used to doing what we would like to do. But nevertheless it is the only method of social control we have ever seen. The police do not solve the problem. In Montreal a few years ago the police went on strike. The whole population went berserk and invaded shops, smashed the place, assaulted people - in other words, went mad. There is, in fact, no alternative.

The only method of social control we know of is exerted by public opinion and effecting the traditional ideas. Force is oppressive, but I am not suggesting we go right back to the past. We cannot recreate the past. We cannot eradicate the experiences of last 150 years. We have to create something which had many things in common with the traditional forms of the past, without recreating it exactly as it was. We would be incapable of doing it.

The tribals too want the benefits of economic development.

The 100,000 people on the Narmada - the tribals - who are willing to drown, who say they are not going to move, I cannot believe that they are too much in favour of economic development somehow. They want to go on living their own lives. In Stockholm, Medha Patkar who was given the Right Livelihood Award, came with a tribal man from that area. I do not think these people are all that keen on economic development. Even if they are not, the point is how do we answer these questions?

As I see it governments are not going to want these types of societies. If you see the Soviet Union, they have gone back to their original states. This has meant a job loss for Mr. Gorbachev, and the rest of his cabinet is desperate to keep the thing going otherwise they lose their jobs. Governments are not going to be on the side of this type of decentralisation. I find it difficult to believe that they are. They often say they are, but they never are. Government needs lots of money to stay in power.

The British government needs 40 percent of GNP to stay in power, to provide people with services, like increasing the National Health Service and the education system. If governments do not have this money to spend, they get voted out. So they are hooked on development, because it is only development which will provide them this money. They need to stay in power. The Dutch government, I believe, costs 60 percent of GNP. So governments are very much in favour of economic development. It is not easy. I am not suggesting that there is a ready made solution.

Why do you assume that people would find living in villages attractive? Everyone I am sure would prefer to live in big urban cities.

I don't. I accept that big centres are more fascinating, for people like you and me. I have been educated to be an urban man. The whole of my education is an urban education. So I have been taught by my upbringing and by my experience on this planet to enjoy a lot of things I find in cities which I probably would not find in some distant village. I moved to a small village, by the way, 17 years ago in Cornwall. Many of my colleagues live there and some of them went in for agriculture on a small scale, rather unsuccessfully, I might add! But they have come back to the city, because they are so involved in things in the city that they cannot live miles away. I believe that I have no answer to that. This is not the problem. The problem is the fact that however fascinating to you and me, this kind of development is not sufficient. We are looking at people as a whole, at the natural environment, climate and other much more important considerations.

Man is more comfortable now because of scientific and technological advancement. Man has landed on the moon, which means that science can provide the answers to many of our problems.

I do not think, really, that going to the moon is a remarkable achievement. It is very, very impressive, but does not solve any of the massive problems. Man has never suffered from not going to the moon. If you want pebbles there are plenty of pebbles, there are very wonderful pebbles, impressive pebbles, there are pebbles everywhere you go! This is not the problem. I was on a television programme years ago called Thanks for the frying pan, because they looked at the spin-offs from the moon shots, and the one spin-off they had was the non-stick frying pan. I think we can live without that.

I do not think these high technology things are necessary. We are being proposed all sorts of high-tech adventures at the moment. The National Academy of Sciences have just resolved the climate problem: putting up 50,000 one sq. km mirrors into space, you see, to reflect the sun's rays away! These high-tech things are not serious proposals. I think going to the moon is a game - an amusing game - but no more. It does not solve things about living long.

Longevity is not going up. It went up for a while, and infant mortality was reduced. But in the western world we have not heard of an increase in the expectation of life. And now it is starting to fall. We are creating ideal conditions world wide for the spread of infections and disease. Every time you build dams you create a niche for masses of disease carrying bacteria, for malaria which gives blindness. When you cut a forest down we come in contact with all the parasites and animals which have lived in these forests, carrying the origins of malaria, yellow fever, and new diseases rampant now in Amazonia. Every single disease, in fact, except smallpox, seems to be increasing world wide. So all our high-tech medicines may have made some people more comfortable but it has not reduced incidence of disease.

What are all these high-tech things going to do for us? We make atom bombs, but is that a great thing? Is it better to wage war with atom bombs or with bows and arrows? I do not see any great advance in these technologies. If you look at the actual effect it is negative.

To abolish everything seems to be going a little too far.

We have done all sorts of things without knowing the impact. Our scientists exploded an atom bomb in a magnetic belt of this planet, about 20 years ago, without knowing what this belt is for or the effect upon this planet. People wanted to dig a hole through the crust of the earth. So scientists started digging a hole and spent 100 million on that but nothing came out of it. They stopped, thank God!

They are going on doing things without the foggiest idea of the consequence of what they are doing to the planet, because they do not understand things. If you do not understand things, for Christ's sake do not change them because we know that the planet works very well without digging holes through it, or exploding hydrogen bombs. What we do not know is if the planet will continue to work with these changes. So if the argument is against changes, then let us turn to the sort of life that we do understand.

You are trying to project a visionary society for the sake of argument.

The minimum thing that should come out of these discussions is that we should question basis assumptions. One of our problems is that we do not do this. We assume that development is right, that free trade is right, we assume that these are the means of building up wealth. But how do we know this is the case? The experience of the last 30 years does not confirm these assumptions, so let us question them. But no one questions anything. The organisers of UNCED are not questioning these basic assumptions. This is reflected in their preparatory papers.

Even if we did want to change things, we are bullied into following a certain path. How do we ordinary people deal with these bullies? Is the need to follow austerities only for ordinary people or is it for all?

This is a key question. We are faced with massive problems which our governments are not solving. The British government, the American administration, refuse to accept that there is any connection between the global warming and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has increased temperatures between five to seven degrees. They will do nothing. Obviously there must be some way that people can take matters into their own hands and join organisations.

These Non-governmental Organisations are becoming very powerful. Greenpeace has three million members in America. Local communities must become more powerful in applying pressure on governments and international agencies and taking whatever action is required - non-violent action - to try and change our policies.

I am personally convinced that if we continue moving in this direction for long, we are moving towards extinction of our species. There is no question about that. With the global warming we are seeing, the planet is becoming more uninhabitable. We have to do these things ourselves. The only measures taken in England, by the British government, are those imposed on it by public opinion. So we have to do the job ourselves, there is no doubt about it.

Is that possible if our government is threatened by the United States of America?

There is no magical formula. There are a thousand things to do, to apply pressure in every way, to try and reverse current policies world wide. The environmental advisor to Britain's Prime Minister gave a talk at the Law Society in which he actually foresaw the invasion of Europe by hordes of people from North Africa, whose land was submerged by the rising sea levels which will necessarily accompany the sort of global warming people are envisaging. He has talked quite happily about 300 - 400 million people crossing the Mediterranean, invading England, etc. But I am afraid his views are not apparent in the behaviour of our Prime Minister.

The National Academy of Sciences actually said America does not have to worry about global warming because it is a big country with lots of different climatic areas, but, hinting that if the southern part of America became uninhabitable - Georgia, Florida, California because it is too hot - we could shift these people off to Minnesota or something like that - an astonishing suggestion on the part of the National Academy of Sciences. About a quarter of the population of Mexico has already moved into America. Texas and California are rapidly becoming Mexican. This is a perfectly possible scenario actually proposed by establishment people today.

We live in a world which is so rapidly becoming totally destabilised that almost anything is possible now.