Sunset ports on the new trade routes - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Stephen Muecke
THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT THE EMERGING POWER OF INDIA is occurring at a time when a new paradigm of trade is emerging, one that values the local and seeks a balance with natural resources. The development of South Asia has the potential to pull these strands into the development mix in a way that has not happened before.
An example from the Goa-Kerala areas on the south-west coast of India, of the fishing industry, demonstrates this potential. The compiler of the activist sourcebook on Goan ecology, Fish Curry and Rice (Goa Foundation), Claude Alvarez is anti-global through long experience, and forceful in his support of local traditional practices. For instance, with the "mechanisation" of fishing in the regions, of a total population of 1.3 million in the state of Goa, he estimates that 50,000 people make a living from fish harvesting on the hundred kilometre coastline. But he notes that when the West started to "help" in the early 1950s by increasing the fish catch with new technology, the real motive may have been to create a market for the technology.
The West is not the only villain for Alvarez, who identifies an ideology of mechanisation enshrined in the gospels of Indian development policy – the famous Nehruvian five-year plans. But he concludes the whole exercise was disastrous. Even the Indian Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute shows a much greater return on investment for peasant fisheries than for mechanised fishing with trawlers. So Alvarez's strictly local activism means he can't, or won't, factor in macro-economic pressures associated with globalisation and reform. It is hard to trade off the national need to be in the global economy by devaluing the rupee and going for export markets against the need for locals to continue a peasant economy.
This contradiction played itself out in local politics as fisherfolk opposed the introduction of power boats and trawlers with mass rallies and alternative candidates. While many mobilised to save their livelihoods, others got into the trawling business. In terms of the management of coastal cultures, mechanisation was a monoculture mentality: a massive technology harvesting one product in which any fine-tuned interchanges between coast and hinterland were irrelevant. Perhaps the era of the peasant farmer quietly trading rice for fish on the coast is over, as the people by the beach in Goa rent out shacks to the huge numbers of foreign tourists coming each year. But the tourists, too, must eat, and even if the best fish and shrimp find their way to their tables at inflated prices, the local ecology is under pressure. Indeed, fish stocks in the whole of the Indian Ocean are declining to the point of crisis, like they are in the North Sea, where sustainability strategies are now firmly in place.
Sustainability is not something that most official economic reports factor into their calculations of wealth. Partha Dasgupta, professor of economics at St John's College, Cambridge, on the other hand, helps us think about the relations of economies to ecologies grounded in local places, not floating free in the abstracted realm of reform policy as dictated by corporate globalism: "Economists ... have moved steadily away from seeing location as a determinant of human experience. Indeed, economic progress is seen as a release from location's grip on our lives." In this context, the macro-economic story contradicts the local stories about the love of homeland, as well as travellers' tales about the beauty of place. Each story is told about some "good" (value), crafting a narrative of a place that is in some sense algebraic; a set of calculations working towards a positive outcome, that values production and place. Dasgupta wrote in the New Statesman in November 2003: "Economic statisticians interpret wealth narrowly. Wealth should include not only manufactured capital (roads and buildings, machinery and equipment, cables and ports) and what is nowadays called human capital (knowledge and skills), but also natural capital (oil and minerals, fisheries, forests and, more broadly, ecosystems). I use the term ‘inclusive investment' for this broader definition of wealth and contrast it with the narrower scope of ‘recorded investment'."
The logic of natural capital is one of complexity and interconnectedness, and this logic is destroyed by the imposition of the grid pattern of ownership of parcels of land, where the "free services" provided by nature, as in a stream flowing through a number of properties, or the bounty of the sea, do not enter into the calculations of economists. He writes: "Those who destroy mangroves in order to create shrimp farms, or cut down forests in the uplands or watersheds to export timber, are not required to compensate fishermen dependent on the mangroves, or people in the lowlands whose fields and fisheries are protected by the upland forests. Economic development in the guise of growth in per capita GNP of improvement in the Human Development Index can come in tandem with the decline in the wealth of some of society's poorest members. Rural communities in poor countries recognised the local connectedness of nature's services long ago and devised mechanisms to cope with the problems created by it. A pond or woodland is a system of organic and inorganic material, offering multiple services. This feature of ponds and woodlands makes them unsuitable for division into private property."
Dasgupta, by adding another variable ("nature's services") to the formula for an inclusive calculation of wealth, comes up with a result that contradicts the misplaced optimism about the rise of wealth in developing economies. India, for example, is supposed to be growing at a healthy 2.3 per cent of GNP a head – on Dasgupta's figures – but on the inclusive calculation the average Indian is getting poorer at a rate of half a per cent each year. The warming of the Indian Ocean, with its effect on reefs and fish, has produced an immediate reduction in natural capital. This is going beyond the simple reduction in fish stocks; the crisis is pushing the ocean into an unfamiliar eco-system.
Future trade should sensibly see itself as sustainable, passing on to the next generation at least the "wealth" we still cling to. Economists and business leaders henceforth should invite a new partner to the summit talks, to make nature a signatory to the contract, as French philosopher Michel Serres advocates in his book The Natural Contract (University of Michigan Press, 1995).
THERE IS A FAIRLY RECENT POST-HUMANIST PHILOSOPHY where man more modestly assumes a less central philosophical position in the world. European Enlightenment, though, had man looking up to a singular god, and down to lower species and to nature. In the central and mediating position, between god and nature, he embarked on a global adventure, a forward-marching triumphant modernity. But now nature – or rather ‘natures' in the plural -are arguing back, putting forceful arguments about the finitude of resources. Suddenly, the value of local places, villages and streams, coasts and islands, comes to the fore. "Are our thoughts, until recently rooted exclusively in their own history, rediscovering geography, essential and exquisite? Could philosophy, once alone in thinking globally, be dreaming no longer?" Serres asks.
I take my cue from him and seek to integrate value as a cultural and economic term. It is worth bearing in mind that both Australian and Indian thinkers – philosophers and economists – can, and have already, thought outside the "box" of the European Enlightenment, and can embrace both the traditional peasant farmer's concerns and the notion of "alternative modernities". In traditional Indian Ocean trade, commodity value is obviously crucial, and it governs the movement of goods.
The trade in ivory is a stunning case study. Ivory was in abundance in Africa in the pre-colonial period. It was not treated as a precious substance. Resistant to termites, it was used for palisades or cattle yards in villages. This meant that traders from India could do good business, distributing ivory in the then global economy centred in the Indian Ocean, where it would be transformed into a luxury item, worth many times its original value. So a natural material, abundant in certain areas, is converted through the addition of cultural value into a precious material. Now a new set of values asserts itself via the argument that is put by elephants, so to speak, through their human advocates. The arguments trumpeted by the suffering elephants are about sustainability and ecological balance in Africa. By integrating the concept of value, cultural values (an appreciation of the beauty of a carved ivory artefact or, conversely, the compassion for elephants criminally slaughtered) need not contradict or compete with the corporation's need for profit. The corporation and its shareholders must be convinced, though, about the unsustainability of a purely exploitative relationship with nature where the value flows only one way and is assumed to be limitless.
Another example, as I try to rejig the system of values in this narrative of a natural contract, is to think again about competition, which is taken to be "second nature" in business. Indeed, let us admit that here, too, in the "culture" of business, there is also "nature", for in a post-humanist perspective it is far from productive to have strict separation between cultures and natures as if only the former can act, while the latter is passive, unadaptive and without its own histories.
In early Indian Ocean trade, the peaceful practice of the Jains and Banians has been noted by the historians, who have also gone on to point out that the Europeans brought another kind of configuration to trade when they started to blockade ports to force monopolies: their ships had cannon. Henceforth, trade competition was a war, and it still is (as in Iraq, with oil, an inert substance, but a major player). "If we move from war to economic relations," says Serres, "nothing notable changes in the argument."
After the economic battles have been waged, with all of their waste and inefficiency, a contract might be signed between the warring parties to divide the remaining spoils. But nature is only just starting to be present as a signatory to this social and economic contract.
The tsunami in the Indian Ocean is a case of the natural at its most forceful and catastrophic. Normally, the ocean is known and "read" by its coastal peoples in its complex, chaotic and rhythmic patterns. The deep knowledge of monsoons, currents and tides has underpinned a living for millennia for the peoples now unceremoniously ousted from the coast by tsunami and tourism developers.
The ocean literally connects us to our north-western neighbours. The connection was made compassionately by many Australians at the time of the tsunami and may help shape future relations as Australia takes its place in a new global trading order. As the international studies commentator and academic Anthony Burke has commented: "On maps the oceans are crisscrossed with borders, but their liquid depths have no concept of them, and nor do the earth and atmosphere with which they form a dynamic system ... The oceans that connect us – especially in times of desperation and tragedy – show us the way forward. Our fates are linked; let's make a better fate, a common fate."
Let us hope that the compassion towards suffering can also moderate and refine the language of politics and commerce, so that these, too, can include a much greater measure of the health of living things and the environment, creating a wealth that can be shared and passed on. ♦