Introduction

What is Ecological Debt?
(Friends of the Earth International)

Ecological Debt is the liability that industrialized countries have for the damage they have caused to the livelihood of humans and to life in the planet. Such destruction is the direct effect of their production and consumption which constitute an unsustainable model of development, strengthened by globalization, and a threat to the sovereignty of nations.

Ecological Debt is the obligation and responsibility that industrialized countries of the North have with the Third World, for the exploitation of their natural goods such as oil, minerals, forests, biodiversity, indigenous and peasant knowledge, marine goods, and for the disproportionate and illegitimate use of the atmosphere and of the oceans to dump waste, including the greenhouse gases.

Raw materials, fossil fuels and other goods are exported from the South to the North without taking into consideration the environmental damage that they cause, as well as the cheap price of human health and livelihood of the local populations. Transnational corporations exploit such resources. Court cases against transnationals claiming damages for environmental destruction very often fail. There is no corporate accountability. There is therefore an ecological unequal exchange, because the South exports much energy and materials at a cheap price. In addition to this, the Third World is home to the production of chemical and nuclear arms, toxic products are manufactured (as in Bhopal) or toxic waste is deposited in their soil.

Ecological Debt was generated in the colonial era and has been increasing ever since.

This social and environmental, local and global destruction benefits economically a small, powerful group that maintain a model of development based on exaggerated consumption and waste. According to United Nations figures, 20% of the population of the world, the majority who live in the North, consume 80% of the planet's natural resources.

The way of life that Northern industrialized countries enjoy is due to the flow of natural goods, financial resources and the poorly paid work of the Third World, without taking into account the social and environmental damage that the extraction of these goods generates.

The impoverished countries of the South subsidize this industrialized model. This has to stop.

Currently, the mechanisms of exploitation and destruction are contributing the increasing the ecological debt, aided by new strategies applied by transnational corporations, as well as structural adjustment programs, various forms of credit for mining and fossil fuel extraction, or free trade agreements.

Foreign investment for development, the deregulation of states, the privatization programs for services and natural goods, intellectual property rights agreements and technology transfer, so-called clean development mechanisms, are some of the new forms of domination and generation of the ecological debt.

International organisms such as the IMF, WB and the WTO, try to perfect these mechanisms by creating the world commercial agreements in the world, as the cost of making peoples suffer and resources being over-exploited.

However, hope for a full life for everyone is renewed when movements of resistance challenge the dominant model of globalization and homogenization, and show that there really are alternatives.

The Zapatista movement in Mexico, the struggle of the Movement of the Landless movement in Brazil, the Vía Campesina around the world, and the many local communities which oppose projects that affect them (whether they are dams, mining projects, industrial shrimp farming, deforestation and uniform tree plantations), they are all examples of resistance and are part of a movement that is growing every day.

Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, South and South-East Asia have bitter memories and a bitter reality of exploitation.

The claim of the Ecological Debt is one more tool in order to defend energy, food and economic sovereignty of our countries.

THE RELATION BETWEEN EXTERNAL DEBT AND ECOLOGICAL DEBT

In order to carry out the obligations and pay the interests of external debt, Third World countries are pressured to export more and more of their resources, generating even more ecological debt.

For instance, the volume of exportations from Latin America increased from 1980 to 1995 some 245%. From 1985 and 1996, in 12 years 2,7 billion tons of basic products, the majority non-renewable, had been extracted and exported. This does not take into consideration how much material is transformed, destroyed or displaced in order to achieve these exportats and does not take into consideration the populations that have been affected or displaced.

As an example we can quote that in this same time period between 1982 until 1996, in fourteen years Latin America has reimbursed 740 billion dollars, in other words, more than double what it owed in 1982 that was 300 billion dollars. However, the debt did not diminish but instead increased to 607 billion dollars.