| Last updated at 1:06 PM on 11/07/08 |
Prime Minister Harper's steamed spinach trauma 
AND ANOTHER THING
CAMPBELL WEBSTER 
The Guardian
The scraps of life, stories, events, and old friends which roll around inside our heads define much of how we approach our day-to-day interactions.
Childhood memories ring loudest at times, including parables and bits of wisdom planted in our brains by usually well-meaning relatives and other adults. A lot of us, it seems, are familiar with the story about the turkey who sat on a bag a feed and starved to death. Message to child: You have the solutions to your own problems, if you would just notice the world around you (and underneath you, in the turkey example.) But perhaps the most universal childhood admonishment was the "Finish your broccoli, there are starving children in country X."
It has become a little passe, the finish-your-unappealing-vegetable-of-the-day instruction, and not only because it has little real motivational value to an eight-year-old. Indeed, the logic is completely flawed, as it establishes in the mind of the child an abstract, and unseen misery in some far-off land, with the solution offered by the parent is for the child confronting the broccoli to suffer as well.
"What's the point of that?" the child would surely ask. When you think about it, all it probably accomplishes is the instilling in the child of a deep resentment of the unseen starving children. Were it not for those other children, the broccoli, or brussel sprout, or peas could be easily tossed aside, guilt free.
Poor Stephen Harper. It seems clear from his remarks this week that his childhood was replete with incidents like the above, with legions of angry aunts pinning him to the ground stuffing steamed spinach into his mouth, shouting "They can't enjoy this in Ghana or Guatemala or Kenya."
What else could explain his quasi-demand at the G8 Summit that the developing countries must shoulder a greater burden of the reduction of carbon emissions?
The finger-pointing nature of this demand is ridiculous in the extreme, and not only because the global nature of business and the world economies mean that much of the pollution generated in developing countries is in the service of the G8 economies. Yes, the pollution takes place in developing countries, but it is multinationals who seek out foreign lands in which to pollute with impunity, so that the resulting profits can enrich the G8.
Coffee, the poster child of how our consumption pollutes and destroys developing countries, is a fine example of how the G8 countries extract profits to their benefit. Ninety-five per cent of coffee served in G8 coffee franchises is not organic, fair trade coffee, meaning that in countries such as Kenya, Vietnam, and Guatemala, the air, land and water is destroyed so that the G8 countries can have a little pep in the morning. What's worse, pesticide application on non-organic fair trade coffee is largely a job for women without protective gear, as they are more likely to be illiterate and unable to read the warning labels on the bags of chemicals they handle. The result? Rampant cancers, infant mortalities, and birth defects. Finish your morning coffee, Stephen, people are dying for you to enjoy it.
It is increasingly a one-world economy, where those working for a dollar a day, over 900 million on our planet, are working for us, and those developing countries with high carbon emissions are significant engines of our business. What the G8, and Stephen Harper, should really be saying is that the pollution and carbon emissions generated by multinational corporations in the G8 should be mandated by our countries to stop the environmental damage they are wreaking in all countries in which they operate, not just the G8 countries.
If Harper really believed what he said, he is as oblivious as the turkey is of the bag of feed on which he sits. The bag of feed is not causing the turkey's starvation problems any more than the developing countries are causing global warming. It is global business, largely resident in the G8 countries. So eat your broccoli, guilt free. But drink organic, fair-trade coffee.
Campbell Webster, a television producer and writer, lives in Charlottetown. He can be reached by e-mail at: cweb@isn.net
And Another Thing
Campbell Webster
|
