Globalization lies behind many of the environmental problems that affect Latin America. The continent’s export flow keeps on growing, but this international insertion still depends on raw materials, which are simply natural resources scarcely processed and with little added value, that generate several environmental impact.

On one side we have the position that acknowledges the seriousness of the environmental problems, but understands that globalization is inevitable. It therefore resigns a change in the essence of international mechanisms, and appeals at incorporating Nature to global markets and managing it through economic mechanisms. Another position, instead, considers that the conservation of our natural resources will only be possible once we become autonomous facing globalization. This is a crucial step in order to recover the possibilities of a sustainable development that preserves Nature.

These positions were discussed in the Latin American Congress of Protected Areas which was held a few days ago in Bariloche (Argentina). A good example of the fatalist acceptance of globalization was offered by Conservation International (CI), a transnational institution dedicated to conservation issues in several countries of the continent. This organization presented the paper “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness” written by Timothy Killeen, an American CI investigator who has been living in Bolivia for several years, and where he depicts with astonishing details the environmental problems that are taking place in the Amazonian tropics. His forecast is ominous: in the most probable scenario only 30 to 40% of the Amazon will be preserved.

CI analysis offers many examples of the wicked relations between current globalization and its environmental effects, but in its proposals it is trapped in a fatalist acceptance of current globalization. There would not be real and possible alternatives facing this global storm, and therefore the only possibility would be to adapt to its rules. The predominance of the markets must be acknowledged and manipulated through mechanisms of regulations, says CI. Consequently, its management plans are based essentially in market mechanisms, whether it is by generating income with what is called “environmental services” or by subsidizing environmentally friendly production systems.

The problem is that most of the CI proposals reinforce the situation of a dependent development. Indeed, it gives a lot of attention to the sale of the so-called carbon fixation credits, by which the protection of the forest is financed as a machine to fix greenhouse gases generated by industrialized countries. Just as today we sell raw materials, under this mechanism, we would sell “carbon credits”, where our lands would be the ecological drainage for industrialized countries to keep up their pace of polluting emissions.

These mechanisms impose upon Latin America the role of global environmental fender in a transnational green market that is functional to the contemporary capitalist production style. This scheme does not entail changes in the essence of the styles of development and keeps almost all of the current problems unresolved, which go from the redistribution of wealth to the need of generating our own industrialization options.

But an even more amazing limitation of the CI proposal is that it seems to develop in a geopolitical void. Little is said about international commerce regulations, of the development of regional integration inside Latin America, or the different positions of the governments about development and globalization. Although it deals with the new plans of highway integration, its actual purpose of going deeper into global markets is not adequately analyzed. Key matters such as the role of the World Trade Organization, the terms of commercial exchange, or the flows of capital that finance the extraction of natural resources are pending. In sum, CI is swept by the global storm.

Present economic development of exports keeps on growing in importance, but most still depend on natural resources. In Brazil and the other countries of the Southern Cone, raw materials represented 60% of total exports in 2005; in the Andean countries they soared to 84.5% of all external sales. In other words, more than half of exports depend on natural resources, and this generates enormous pressure on natural areas. Although Chile is presented as an example of serious economic management supposedly very different from that of its neighbors, from the point of view of an ecological economy, we see that over 86% of its exports are raw materials (natural resources with very little processing) and therefore very similar to the exporting pattern of countries like Peru (85% of total exports) or Bolivia (89%). This dependence is true in almost every case.

The current plans of highway and energy interconnection point at enhancing this strategy even further, opening different wilderness areas (particularly in the tropics) to exploitation, on one hand, and on the other, linking them to oceanic ports. These processes will make Latin America to stay tied to current globalization. In fact, the consumption level of industrialized countries and the high growth new economies such as China, in only possible using the energy and natural resources of the Third World, and therefore, this same framework generates a kind of globalization that allows this transference of resources.

In order to face these problems another attitude is needed to face globalization: the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources is only possible with a radical change in the styles of development and global relations. Therefore, any serious ecological proposal must call for a different style of development, and consequently, another wordlisation. Perhaps in some cases the mechanisms of market will be useful (specially in order to avoid private entrepreneurships cast the economic costs of environmental deterioration onto local communities or municipalities), but other deeper measures about development styles will be essential, reducing their dependence on natural resources and their energy consumption, shifting them in the first place towards national and regional needs and only then towards global markets.

Under this perspective the concept of autonomy appears as a key concept. It is crucial to recover autonomy facing globalization, to recover the autonomy in order to try other styles of development which can overcome the conditions and demands of global markets. It’s not possible to insist on adapting Nature to the markets, markets should be adapted in order to ensure the conservation of Nature. Global factors such as the demand for natural resources and the dynamic of international financial markets as well as its political institutions should be faced from that commitment. Therefore, the present road must point towards the recovery of autonomy so that we will not be swept away by the global storm.

- Eduardo Gudynas. Investigator for D3E (Desarrollo, Economía, Ecología y Equidad) [Development, Economics, Ecology and Equity] in Montevideo (Uruguay)

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