Debt for Climate

Personal motivation

There’s a whole history to be told to be able to understand why I chose to raise money for debt for climate. This is a part of the history of this world, why poor countries became poor and are kept poor. Everything I’m explaining here I got from the book ‘The Divide’ by Jason Hickel, the website of debt for climate and this article of debt justice UK. There’s way more to this story, and if this interests you I highly recommend reading ‘The Divide’. Donate here!

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The equal world before colonialism

Communities

Before the age of colonialism, in the 15^th century, there was no real difference between incomes and living standards of ordinary people between Europe and the rest of the world. People living in the Americas, India and Asia were actually sometimes even better off. Most Europeans lived in communities that were crowded, highly unequal and rife with disease. They relied exclusively on agriculture for food, which required back-breaking labour and yielded very little nutritional value. Life-expectancies of people in forager-farmer communities, like in the Americas of the 15^th century, were around 50 percent longer. They were less likely to die of famine while they had a much more diverse food system. They also worked fewer hours and their work was lighter. There were no powerful aristocrats or landlords around to force them to work, or to skim their yields for profit. And lastly, they were less exposed to the diseases that plagued densely populated societies.

Life-expectancies

Until the 1800s China, Japan and other parts of Asia also had an advantage over Europe. During these times life-expectancy in Japan was in between forty-one and fifty-five, in China between thirty-five and forty and South-East Asia around forty-two. Whereas in England life-expectancy was between thirty-two and thirty-four and only fifteen for children born in working-class families. In France life-expectancy was between twenty-eight and thirty and in Germany between twenty-five and thirty-one. Furthermore in 1500 Europe’s part of global GDP was 15%, whereas China and India controlled 65% of the world economy.

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Colonialism

Columbus and other inquisitors

When Columbus set sail he landed on Cuba in 1492 which he insisted was India. He reported in his journal about the indigenous groups that he met that ‘they were so free with their possessions that they offer to share with anyone’. They lived in communal buildings and enjoyed a remarkable degree of equality, also between genders. Women were free to leave their partners when they felt mistreated. The people were healthy and strong, and other observers marveled at how far they could swim. They noted that even pregnant women were agile and independent, gave birth with ease and were up and about again shortly thereafter. Columbus also noticed that they didn’t bear arms and he could exploit this vulnerability. In his journal he stated ‘with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want’. He started doing this on his second expedition as he captured thousands of indigenous Americans and sent them back to Spain to be sold as slaves. For this expedition his objective was gold. He had noticed that the indigenous people were wearing gold ornaments and assumed the metal must be abundant in the region. When arriving in Hispaniola (the island which is today Haiti and the Dominican republic), he forced the local Arawaks, to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. The ones who failed would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Columbus forced men to live in mines to search the mountains of gold. Within 15 years of this new regime, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and in the mines.

Columbus was not the only person that brought inequality and despair. After him, Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and Francisco Pizarro in Peru. Both of them have captured the indigenous emperors to seize power and destroyed towns and massacred their inhabitants they passed along the way.

Raw materials from colonies

In the beginning of the 16^th century, Europeans discovered the immense network of silver mines in Potosi, which is now Bolivia. In between 1503 and 1660, around 16 million kilograms of silver was shipped to Europe. Which is around three times of the total amount of metal reservers that Europe has. This was already on top of the 185,000 kg of gold that arrived in Spanish ports during the same period. Most of this silver and gold was traded again with China and India which changed Europe into the biggest economic power after the 1800s. All of this happened completely at the expense of Latin America, where around 95% of the people got killed.

Next to the genocide happening in the Americas, prisoners of war, captured in conflicts between West African states were labeled as slaves. They were transported to work in the Americas on European sugar plantations in the Caribbean and in the mines of Brazil. The gain from slavery was not only the free labour, but also the sugar and cotton itself, that was harvested from the plantations. Sugar came to account for 22 per cent of the calories that Britain consumed. This reduced the need for domestic agricultural production and freed up labour power for industrial pursuits. Cotton provided a key raw material for Europes industrial revolution, and without diverting from food production or straining Europe’s labour and land capacities. Adding timber, the New World contributed in between 25 to 30 million ‘ghost acres’ of productive land to Britain alone. These slave-produced imports were one of the single largest factors in spurring Europe’s rapid economic development. Without it, Europe would not have been able to shift its economic capacity towards industrialization.

Back in England

Next to colonization, England’s wealthy nobles started to privatize their lands to change them into sheep pastures. Breaching the centuries-long right of habitation for peasants, on which the peasants dependent for food and shelter. With the common land disappearing, the peasants were left in a massive refugees crisis. They had no home, no land and no food. Only one option was left: sell their labour for wages. This provided the cheap labour necessary to fuel the industrial revolution, since they had no choice but to accept the slavery-like conditions and rock-bottom wages of factory work.

Colonization in Africa and Asia

Africa and Asia also got their share of pain. In between 1870 and 1914 Europe’s control over Africa went from 10% to 90% of the continent. Killing ten million of Congolese under the Belgian King Leopold’s brutal regime, around half of the population. The Dutch and British forced the South African population to work in mines and plantations. Next to the 70 million indigenous deaths in Latin America, in India 30 million people died of famine. During the age of colonialism China’s share in the world economy went from 35% to 7% and India’s from 27% to 3%.

Europe’s industrial revolution was only possible because of the resources they extracted from their colonies. And it was a base for an economic system designed to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority.

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Getting back up after colonialism

The Debt

If you think about the exploitation and destruction that former colonizers caused to both the people and the planet on the countries that were colonized, you would say that they owe a debt. A debt to repay the destruction that they caused and the labour that they took for free. This debt remains however unpaid and largely unacknowledged. Instead, former colonies were forced to compensate European rulers after gaining independence. This happens for example by inheriting debt accumulated by colonial powers during their rule. Or by being forced to pay compensation to former colonial rulers for the loss of income resulting from the liberation of enslaved people. This meant that many countries that embarked on independence were saddled with a harmful debt owed to their former colonial rulers, undermining their ability to progress and facilitating ongoing European domination. Apart from this debt forced on the global South, they are also actively hindered to develop into more stable and sustainable economies and societies.

The Great Depression

Around the end of the colonial age, the Great Depression hit the western world, which continued until the 1930s. To understand the Great Depression, we need to understand that capitalists seek to maximize their profits by increasing productivity and decreasing the costs of production. The easiest way to decrease the cost of production is to push down workers’ wages. However, if this process is left unchecked, wages get so low that workers cannot afford to buy the products they produce. The demand goes down and the market becomes glutted with excess goods with no one to buy them. This causes the economy to slow down and gave rise to the Great Depression.

Keynesianism

Joyn Maynard Keynes, a British economist, argued to deal differently with the depression. Governments should not cut spending and wages, but instead increase government spending, open up the money supply and encourage higher wages. After massive government spending into workers’ wages, workers would gain consumer power that would create new opportunities for private businesses, which spring up where the cash is plentiful. During the second world war, government spending on factory production for the war effort had the same effect, boosting employment, increasing wages and stimulating demand. After Roosevelt came in to power in 1933 he implemented Keynesianism in the United States and economic growth soared. With higher wages for the poor poor and higher taxes for the rich, inequality was dramatically reduced. Especially for people who conformed a particular norm – white, male and straight, this worked very well.

Developmentalism

The rise of Keynesianism coincided precisely with the last decades of European colonialism. Seeing how well this concept worked for Europe and the United States, global South countries were quick to adopt its basic principles. State-led development, plenty of social spending and decent wages for workers . A desire to build their economies for their own national good, rather than solely for the benefit of external powers.

During this age of developmentalism the global South was thriving. Between the 1960s and 1970s a high per capita income growth rates of 3.2%, which was double or triple of what the west achieved during the industrial revolution. In Latin America the gap between the richest fifth and poorest fifth of the population shrank by 22%. By the end of colonialism life expectancy in the global south was around 40 years, and by the early 1980s it shot up to sixty. The same holds for literacy, infant mortality and other key development indicators.

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Western backed coups

When Eisenhower became president in 1953 in the USA, he took a decisive stand against developmentalism. He regarded it as a threat to the commercial interests of America’s multinational companies. The first target of Eisenhowers regime was Iran, where the leader Mohammed Mosadegh had just been democratically elected. He introduced unemployment compensation and benefits for sick and injured workers, abolished forced agricultural labour. Furthermore he raised taxes on the rich to fund rural development projects, and sought to renegotiate ownership of the country’s oil reserves. Up until that point they were controlled by the Britsh Anglo-Iranian oil company, which is now BP. When the company refused to cooperate with an audit of its accounts, the Iranian parliament voted unanimously to nationalize the company’s assets. Since Britain didn’t like this plan they worked together with the USA to finance a military coup to depose Mossadegh and hand power to the Shah of Iran. This happened in 1953, and the next 26 years the Shah governed Iran with US support and policies that were friendly to Western oil companies.

Similar stories happened to Arbenz of Guatamala, where military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas came into power. He favored the American government with the United Fruit Company, which consisted of fertile land stolen from indigenous communities. Similarly in Brazil, where in 1964 a USA backed military coup deposed Goulart and installed a junta that would rule for 21 years. The new regime was overly friendly to Western corporate interests and deregulated foreign investments.

In Indonesia, after the independence from Dutch rule, Sukarno was elected president. He protected the economy from cheap foreign imports, redistributed wealth to the poor and evicted the IMF and the World Bank. When he began to nationalize American and European assets, such as oil and rubber facilities, a coup backed up by the CIA, was lead by general Suharto. In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto hunted down and killed between 500,000 and 1 million Sukarno supporters. Suharto’s military regime ruled until 1998 and was open to Western corporate interests. To make it worse, the university of Californa, Berkeley, trained Indonesian economists to liberalize the economy and eliminate the last vestiges of developmentalism in the country.

Even in Africa there was no way of escaping the Western backed coups. Even before most of the African countires could start with the developmentalist revolution, Western forces already intervened. Where especially France intervened a lot in postcolonial Africa, in the worry to lose control over the region’s resources to the nationalist movement.

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Today

Giving aid to the global south

And now we ask ourselves ‘why are poor countries poor?’ The past few paragraphs should give you an insight on how they became poor, how they were kept poor and how the global North stopped them from having the development they needed to have sustainable economies and societies.

The aid we give the global South is vastly outstripped by the financial resources that flow in the opposite direction, from the global south to the global north. These outflows consist of payments of depth, income that foreigners make in developing countries and then repatriate, like profits that Shell extracts from Nigeria’s oil reserves. There’s also profits that ordinary Europeans and Americans earn on their investments in stocks and bonds they hold in the global south, through for example their pension funds. The biggest chunk of outflow has to do with capital flight. This takes place through ‘leakages’ in the balance of payments between countries, or through an illegal practice called ‘trade misinvoicing’. This concepts makes corporations report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing counties directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions. Another form of capital flight is called ‘abusive transfer pricing’, which is a mechanism that multinational companies use to steal money from developing countries by shifting profits illegally between their own subsidiaries in different countries. Usually the goal of these practices is to evade taxes, but sometimes they are used to launder money or circumvent capital controls. All this money which development countries lose, added together gives a total net outflow of three trillion dollars, which is twenty-four times more than the annual aid budget.

World poverty

Furthermore we see that poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor has been rising steadily over the past decades. In 1820 the income gap between the richest and the poorest country was 3 to 1, and by the end of colonialism in the mid-19th century it was 35 to 1. Since the 1960s it has again tripled in size.

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Debt for climate

The debt

Former colonial powers owe a debt to countries they colonized, and not the other way around as is happening now. The World Bank and the IMF play a big role in this since they are key global decision-making institutions that are dominated by global north powers. Debt for climate wants to force global north governments and institutions to cancel debt for countries weighed down by unsustainable repayments. Next to this they are also asking for climate reparations. Reparations refer to a range of different actions that repair historical injustices and their contemporary manifestations. Reparation demands for slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have been around for a long-time, including reparation demands for the impacts of the climate crisis.

Climate change

Global north governments and corporations are overwhelmingly responsible for causing the climate crisis, yet countries in the global south are experiencing the most extreme impacts. The global north owes a debt for the damage it has caused, but it is refusing to pay up. Even where global north governments are claiming to give support to global south nations in fighting climate change, it is predominantly provided in the form of loans. Rather than giving compensation for the damage they have caused, rich lenders are using the climate crisis as yet another opportunity to increase their control over global south economies and line their pockets with debt repayments.

Debt and climate

Debt for climate is a global grassroots movement initiated and led by the Global South, building power from the bottom-up by uniting workers, indigenous, feminist, faith, environmental, social and climate justice movements in the Global North and South. To cancel the financial debt of the Global South in order to enable a self-determined, just transition. Debt is the most powerful common denominator behind which all of these struggles can unite and fight for global social, ecological and climate justice. More information can be found on the website of Debt for Climate.

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(Neo-)colonialism on the PCT

Colonialism in Turtle Island

Turtle Island has a big colonial history. The land that belonged to no one, that was the livelihood of many. The indigenous communities lived mostly from foraging, they took what they needed, and not more. They lived together with the animals, the plants, the water and the earth. Then, the Europeans came, they claimed the land and they killed most indigeneous communities. They put their children in boarding schools, to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with mainstream American culture. They were punished for using their own language and were taught that their cultures were inferior. Now the land on which they lived, has been taken by the state, companies or privatized. Their languages are going extinct and their communities are thinned out and spread around.

First nation territories

Today, 574 of all first nation territories are recognized by the US government, however over 400 remain unrecognized. There’s a complicated history between the land and the indigeneous community. For example all national parks sit on native lands, and the creation of these national parks was a part of the larger project to displace and dispossess native people of their lands. Late 19th century figures like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt are lauded for their roles in conserving sites like Yosemite and Yellowstone. Sadly, native people are left out of such narratives, despite their original stewardship of those lands. The PCT goes through many of these first nation territories, but they are not often mentioned along the trail. Areas that used to be the livelihood of animals, plants and humans alike, are now destroyed for their resources such as oil, minerals and monoculture food. Due to global warming large parts of the PCT are now endangered by forest fires. Glaciers are melting fast, and this makes river crossings and snowhiking more dangerous each year. The consequences of colonialism and climate change, that debt for climate is fighting for, are so clearly visible iwhen hiking this trail.

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Donated money

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