Colonel Sanders in Kathmandu January 2010
By: C K LalThe one who has smashed tyranny
Broken the back of untrammelled authority
The horse that pulls the chariot of destiny
That one cannot be destroyed.
That one will never die.
– Kedarnath Agarwal in Jo jeevan ki dhool chat kar bada hua hai
John Jantak
Historians argue that Marie Antoinette never uttered the infamous retort ascribed to her. But ‘let them eat cake’ continues to be the exemplar of royal callousness regardless of its contested origin. Whether negotiators of BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) countries at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15) were aware of the power of urban legend in impacting reality is not known. However, when history is written to record the degeneration of “Hopenhagen” into “Nopenhagen”, they would stand guilty of having endorsed the draft prepared by the world’s biggest per capita emitter of CO2 gases – the rich and the powerful countries – that seem to be saying derisively to the rest of the world: “eat less and avoid burning dung patties”.
Dung patties: an endangered species
In hindsight, it appears that the collapse of COP 15 was written in its script. Recovering from an economic meltdown triggered by the Casino Capitalism that had swept the world in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the powerful of the planet were in no mood to listen to desperate appeals for mandatory emission cuts or increased commitment of funds for mitigation measures. It has been much cheaper to sponsor cabinet meetings in scuba gear at the seabed in the Maldives or outrageously expensive oxygen-assisted picnics at the base camp of the Mount Everest in Nepal. The real purpose of the conference may have been to co-opt newly industrialising BASIC countries and then sew them up with strings, the controlling ends of which would be in the hands of financial-military elite in Washington.
The Chinese know that they can never be what the Soviet Union once was to the United States of America – an alternative system of social philosophy and political economy. The destiny of the Chinese is tied with that of Wall Street. So Prime Minister Wen Jiabao chose to absent himself from the last-minute meeting with the world leaders to finalise the draft resolution. Contrary to what was reported in the Western press, it was not a snub to President Barrack Obama but merely an expression of helplessness of the Chinese leaders – they know that they can do nothing to change global warming or anything else of universal concern. China slams those critical of what was decided in Copenhagen because it knows that every promise made in the accord is empty and devoid of empathy for the poor and the environmentally distressed population of the world; its anger is an admission of guilt and an expression of utter frustration.
Brazil’s quest for a more just society went up in smoke the moment it decided to pursue the Western path to fast prosperity. For the very same reason, South Africa has become even more unequal than it already was: its Gini measure of disparity (where zero represents perfect equality while one represents perfect inequality) has increased from 0.64 to 0.73 within a decade. In India too, journalist T N Ninan notes that a Manmohan Singh Doctrine is evolving a philosophy that puts ‘national interest’, which has come to mean that freedom of choice of 300 million consumers is more important than even the fundamental freedoms of everyone else, over and above ideological commitments or ‘third world’ solidarity. This is a MacDonald Code rather than a Manmohan Doctrine and it reigns supreme in almost all capital cities of the developing world. The MacDonald Code is a variant of the pleasure principle, which states that an infant seeks gratification and fails to distinguish fantasy from reality. In a world run on this doctrine, concern for climate change is not on the menu.
Survival strategy
Ever since Nandan Nilekani and Thomas Friedman decided that the world was flat, Western companies have been rushing into what V S Naipaul once called “An Area of Darkness” to teach Southasians how to eat crisp potato chips, drink sugary carbonated drinks and sing ‘Jai ho!’ with gusto. The latest to follow the inexorable trend is Nepal where finally Colonel Sanders has claimed prime property in central Kathmandu. It will serve authentic Kentucky Fried Chicken with poultry imported from Brazil and the rest of the ingredients procured from different parts of the globe. The recipe – or the patented content – is of course American. The carbon-footprint of each piece of chicken is hardly in the minds of the upscale consumers braving Kathmandu’s chaotic traffic to queue up for the treat in Durbar Marg.
Nepal’s mighty donors and loaners know the preferences of the Kathmandu comfortable classes. Together, they sponsored the trip of almost every applicant for the junket to Copenhagen. With more than 192 countries and 12,000 to 15,000 official participants at COP 15, the Nepali contingent was perhaps the largest in terms of population percentage of the country. Meanwhile, the forest cover is often the first target of every political group that wants to create a vote-bank in the name of resettling the landless. And even while community forestry in Nepal is touted as a success story by the aid industry, the long term impact of mono-plantation of fast-growing commercial trees remains to be seen. Massive quarrying of sand and stones in the Chure-Shivalik ranges for grand highways being built for millions of Nanos in neighbouring Bihar and Uttar Pradesh will probably trigger bigger catastrophes than the receding snowline of the Himalaya. But like all Southasians, Nepalis too have slowly begun to lose the capacity to think for themselves.
Mitigation measures do have a role in reducing the impact of climate change, but it is somewhat of a fallacy to say that the poor stand to lose the most by way of global warming. The devastation wrought by melting snows and rising sea levels would actually most affect those who have more to lose. Whether it was COP 15 in Copenhagen or COP 16, scheduled for Mexico next year, representatives of governments which primarily represent powerful industries at home are unlikely to decide on anything that has even a remote chance of upsetting the applecart of global capitalism. Only people’s mass movements at the grassroots can do anything meaningful to cope with the effects of global warming and climate change.
A comprehensive strategy of survival of the planet as a habitable place would need to be designed around grouping of living spaces near the place of work, pleasure and socialisation to reduce travel distance within walking limits, which is about five kilometres per day for most healthy individuals. For other travels, use of bicycles and mass transit systems can be encouraged. Human beings have to realise that global warming began to accelerate the day the motorcar was invented. Irrepressible individualism and fast-food addiction is a product rather than merely a component of car culture.
For cleaner air, larger carbon sinks need to be created near large population centres. The regenerative capacity of the land would have to be enhanced to cope with changes in cropping patterns and reduction in water availability. Water itself would have to be strictly rationed through the ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ formula. Food security is not merely about creating large grain stocks, though that is important in a region where agricultural output is dependent upon the weather cycle, but also about reducing wastage and rationalising consumption. Keeping a fast at least once a
week has become passé, but traditional practices of regulating food consumption were not always foolish or ritualistic.
There is no dearth in Southasia of those criticising dung patties, but options such as solar and wind energy require investments on a scale that no government in the region can make. Burning organic waste has its disadvantages, but who can say that it is riskier or more damaging to the environment than fossil fuel or nuclear energy? All these lifestyle changes sound so simple, perhaps that is the reason they never caught on when Mahatma Gandhi called on everyone to adopt the political economy of Gram Swaraj.
Three of the 10 most populated countries of the world will still be in Southasia when India surpasses China, even as soon as within the next 15 years. What will be the agenda on the table when COP 30 meets to discuss the fate of the Indus-Ganga plains or the black and barren Himalayan peaks? Much of Bangladesh and all of the Maldives are likely to be under water by then anyway. The rich are sadly mistaken if they think they will be the last survivors, having bought their way out of the misery in the Subcontinent. Albert Einstein suggested that science does not have an answer for every human predicament. His view holds true till today. But neither does commerce; not everything is for sale in this fragile world.
C K Lal is a columnist for this magazine and for the Nepali Times.
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