THE CSE STATEMENT ON GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL DEMOCRACY

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THE CSE STATEMENT ON GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL DEMOCRACY
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THE CSE STATEMENT
ON
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL
DEMOCRACY
To be submitted to the forthcoming
UN Conference on Environment and Development

The Centre for Science and Environment
proposes to submit the statement to UNCED.
In case you agree with our proposals,
we would be delighted if you could
send us your endorsement.
Looking forward to your reply,
Anil Agarwal
Sunita Narain
Gita Kavarana
Dinesh Kumar
Rakesh Kapoor.
Anjani Khanna
Koshy Cherail
Robert Wilkinson
Ranjan Basu
Leena Bhanot

Centre for Science and Environment
F-6 Kailash Colony, New Delhi 110048

I
Whither Our Common Future?

s it stands today, our common future is
sharply divided between two antago­
nistic parts. We live in an extremely
divided and disparate world. Abys­
mal poverty and hunger coexist with extraordinary
wealth and overconsumption; unprecendented
knowledge with widespread illiteracy; and, incred­
ible technological and military might with abject
powerlessness. At the same time, the growing envi­
ronmental crisis is forcing the citizens of the world
to realise that the world is one.
Humanity never needed a global social contract
more than it does today. The forthcoming United
Nations Conference on Environment and Develop­
ment to be held in Brazil, with probably over a
hundred world leaders and over a thousand non­
governmental groups in attendance, provides us
with an historic opportunity to formulate precisely
such a global contract. With the the nations of the
world jointly facing a global ecological crisis but
sharply divided in economic terms and with possi­
bilities for conflict immense, there never was a
greater need for humanity to live as one.

A

Different objectives
Every citizen on earth wants his or her environment
used and managed in a sustainable manner. But the
divided economic conditions force different envi­
ronmental management objectives on different na­
tions and communities. While the rich and well fed
are more interested in the environment because
they want to secure their future, the poor and
dispossessed, caught in a daily struggle to survive,
are more interested in the environment because
they wanUp secure their present.

Waste Vs .warfi^\
There is an enormoijs difference in the economies
ofdevelopingand industrialised countries in envi­
ronmental terms.- The former continue to depend
heavily on the exploitation of their natural capital
to meet their current consumption needs and gen­
erate the investments needed to build upastockof
human-made capital and a knowledge and skills
resource base. The industrialised countries, on the

other hand, ha ve already gone through a prolonged
phase of natural resource exploitation, both
within their own countries and outside, to build up
a massive base of human-made capital, knowledge
and skills. This differential situation today leads
to several differences in their economic and
ecological conditions and approaches:

Environmental problems in developing coun­
tries largely result from a greater stress on the
natural resource base (for example, overexploi­
tation of groundwater and surface water,
land degradation, deforestation etc.) whereas
environmental problems in industrialised coun­
tries largely result from problems of pollution
and disposal of waste.
2) Whereas environmental management in in­
dustrialised countries can afford to take a con­
servationist approach with respect to land,
water and forests. In developing countries,
given the extreme pressures on the natural re­
source base for daily survival, on one hand,
and economic growth, on the other, only an
extremely well thoughtout,holistic strategy of
rational and sustainable resource exploita­
tion will be able to reconcile environmental
constraints with development requirements.
But tradeoffs can be carefully considered in
poor economies and a long-term view ade­
quately incorporated if they can generate
more than what they need for current con­
sumption. In other words, they need adequate
financial space for sustainable development.
1)

Unfortunately, the global environmental gov­
ernance system or the new ecological order that is
emerging, is unmindful and uncaring of these dif­
ferent priorities. Recent years have seen strenuous
efforts by the governments and people of the North
to bring about better global management of the
world's resources; starting with the Montreal proto­
col to protect the ozone layer to the proposed con­
ventions on climate change, biodiversity and tropi­
cal forests. Simultaneously, international trade, aid
and debt are becoming green linked, wi th the rich in
the world demanding that their dollars and yen
should be spent in the South only in a way that
secures our "common future". Environmental
management is, thus, being thrust upon the devel­

oping world using the existing levers of power
available with industrialised countries. There is no
effort to create new levers of power that would
allowall citizensof the world to participate in global
environmental management. Today, the reality is
that Northern governments and institutions can,
using their economic and political power, intervene
in, say, Bangladesh's development. But no Ban­
gladeshi can intervene in the development proc­
esses of Northern economies even i f global warming
caused largely by Northern emissions may sub­
merge half the country.
Even worse, the new green twists and turns in
international decision making are being made with
claims to a new morality of global environmental
solidarity. This must be the biggest irony in human
history: those who have been the most immoral in
environmental terms are now preaching to those
who have been largely frugal and sparing. It is
obvious that this moralising must stop and be re­
placed by honest actions.

lems regardless of the fact that they affect millions
today while ozone depletion, which is the result of
tlie overconsumption of a few, has become a global
issue. Tire Global Environmental Facility of the World
Bank, UNEP and UNDP, set up as a major global
initiative to transfer funds to the developing coun­
tries in the area of environment, lends only for socalled global issues. This division of issues is in­
tensely political. It denies the local dimensions of
the global and the global dimensions of the local.
And it distorts the economic and environmental
priorities of the developing world.
This partisan system of global governance may
well secure the interests of the future generations of
the rich across the world, but it will care little
whether the present generations of the poor
can even be assured a bare survival. Such a world
can only be more immoral, inhumane and inhospi­
table.

Equal partners
Northern agenda
The agenda before the Brazil Conference, as yet, is
largely Northern and intensely political. It makes no
more thana token attempt to deal with the issues of
survival and the financial and economic space that
the struggling millions of the developing world
desperately need. The Northern agenda, firstly, sectoralises environmental issues to separate them from
the global economic and cultural processes that lie
at their heart — addressing only the symptoms and
not the causes. It refuses any serious discussion on
the restructuring of international economic rela­
tions even to the extent they relate to environmental
issues. It further puts the control of environmental
resources in the hands of the rich, the very same
people and insti tu tions who have been most respon­
sible for global environmental havoc. So the Mon­
treal protocol as well as the proposed climate treaty
discuss the sharing of the burden of technological
change to repair the global environment but shy
away from talking about an equal sharing of the
resource, our common atmosphere, amongst all
citizens of the world.

Global vs local
Thereis also an undisguised attempt to divert atten­
tion by trying to define what are global environ­
mental issues, and therefore require global negotia­
tions and commitments, and what are local issues
and therefore best left to national action. So deserti­
fication and soil erosion have become local prob­

If all citizens of the world have to manage the planet
Earth as equal partners, then the global environ­
mental agenda itself must be changed. It will have to
recognise, firstly, that for developing countries the
environmental challenge is how to use the resources
of the environment, often at far higher rates of
productivity than at the moment, but in a sustain­
able manner. In the South, for instance, forests are
not wilderness areas but habitats for the poorest of
its poor.
Secondly, that in the South, environmental deg­
radation is strongly related to the global processes
of trade and economic relations. Environmental
degradation, for instance, is intrinsically linked to
the world market system which is rapidly growing
and integrating the use of the world's natural re­
sources. The world market system fixes product
prices in a way that increasingly allows the North to
capture the ecological costs of production and build
it into its pricing structure. Enormous investments
have been made by Northern countries in pollution
control and all consumers of Northern products
across the world now pay the cost of those invest­
ments. But the developing world is not being al­
lowed to capture the ecological costs of its produc­
tion. The terms of trade of its various mineral and
biomass products — tea, coffee, cocoa, bananas,
pineapples, peanuts and prawns — have been
steadily declining even though they are produced at
enormous environmental costs. How can develop­
ing countries make an investment in their future if
even the prospects for today are uncertain?
Developing countries export sustainability while
industrialised countries import it at the cost of the

3

former. This discounts the future of the South and
passes on the immediate costs of environmental
degradation onto the world's poor living on the
margins of their environment.

Southern subsidies
The South has consistently subsidised the gargan­
tuan consumption of the North. A reform of the
world economic system is, therefore, vital so that all
citizens of the world, including the world's poor,
are empowered to take control of their environment
while the rich are made to pay the ecological costs of
their consumption. Only then will the poorer na­
tions have the economic space to invest in their
future. Within their abili ty, the poor already do their
best to conserve their environment and make sus­
tainable use of it. Has anybody ever calculated the
labour costs that Nepalese and Indian farmers of the
Western Himalaya have incurred in the massive
terracing of those mountains to conserve the soils?
The multilateral banks would lose their shirts if
they tried to underwrite these costs.
Apart from the problem of declining terms of
trade, the poor of the world are today enmeshed in
the proverbial moneylenders' clutches — "1 can't
pay but I will pay" — the result of which is that the
South today actually transfers about US $ 50 billion
to the North every year. All these economic losses
have a profound impact on the production systems
of the South —there is precious little left to invest in
the future.

Global resources
The current environmental negotiations are essen­
tially about the use of natural resources — some of
which are truly global commons (like the atmos­
phere and the ozone layer) while others are largely
national resources over which nations have sover­
eign rights (like forests, biodiversity, and the folk
knowledge about the uses of biodiversity). They,
therefore, raise issues which are far more funda­
mental than the old issues of technology transfer
and of new and additional sources of funds raised
repeatedly in UN forums by developing countries.
These are issues of global equity in the use of
global resources and thebasic, inalienable and equal
rights of all human beings to survival and develop­
ment. To the extent that the political and economic
terms of global environmental governance being
proposed are unfair or unequal, it is obvious that
developing countries will see an erosion in their
sovereignty over their national resources, their

rightfuland equitable share of the global commons,
and their right to determine the use of these re­
sources for their development.
Developing countries have both a keen interest
and a serious economic stake in these negotiations.
To prevent the impending ecological disaster
technological transformations and financial allo­
cations will be required. Considering the state of
their economies, many developing countries will
find the financial and technological burden of these
transformations difficult and in some cases, even
impossible.
The current environmental negotiations are
essentially seeking to set up a framework for the
management of global resource exploitation in which
efforts are being made to integrate long-term
concerns (that is, environmental concerns) while
totally neglecting short-term concerns (that is,
immediate economicand ecological concerns). This
is no bid to create a free and fair world. At a time
when natural resources in developing countries
are being consistently 'devalued'within the world
market system — through rising debt, on one
hand, and declining terms of trade of land and
water-based products, on the other — it sounds
callous to preach long-term environmental care
and concern in isolation of immediate concerns.

Lack of confidence
It does not give the South any confidence when the
powerful North disregards all this and tries to play
the role of a green messiah. What good would a few
billion dollar fund do like the Global Environment
Facility when billions of dollars are flowing out of
the South and forcing it every day to discount its
future? This Northern position must be rejected for
whatitis— asham on the very idea ofourcommon
future. Give the South a fair deal by reforming the
world market system so that it can take into account
the ecological costs of producing its commodities
and the South will take care of its environment.
These costs can be captured only through a series of
fiscal and economic instruments as part of a deliber­
ate public policy package. The billion dollar ques­
tion is: are the rich prepared to pay the real costs of
what they consume?
Thirdly, the South needs ecological space to
grow, which has already been colonised by the
. North. The poor are not even using a small fraction
of their legitimate share of the global commons like
the atmosphere, thus, permitting the North to pol­
lute over the last century at little cost and build up
its economy and industrial base extremely cheaply
and rapidly. Has anybody calculated the carbon di­

4

oxide cost of an individual's plane trip from New
York to Chicago? Each flight would exceed a Thai or
Bangladeshi farmer's legitimate share of annual
emissions tens of times?
Fourthly, the South provides all kinds of seeds,
herbs and other resources for genetic variability,
including traditional knowledge about their uses,
which have transformed the world's pharmaceuti­
cal and food industry. Tire North pays nothing to
the South in return for these biological resources
and knowledge while most technical knowledge
emanating from private and corporate sources in
the North is protected by patents and has a strong
financial value. The North, in fact, is not even satis­
fied with the strength of the existing patents system.
Has the North cared to ask what royalties have the
American Indians received for the knowledge they
have given the world about rubber, quinine, choco­
late, curare, potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, tobacco
and com? What royalties have Ethiopia and the
countries of the Congo Basin received for their
coffee? On the contrary, the Amazon Indians are
today amongst the poorest and most persecuted
people. And Ethiopia remains desperate for aid.

Northern responsibility
Since the economic levers of power in the world —
aid, trade and debt — lie largely with the North, it is
its moral responsibility to provide a lead that gives
confidence to the South. The North must indicate its
willingness to deal with basic issues that force the
South to scrape the earth. And, most importantly, it
must stop preaching. Does anybody seriously be­
lieve that the earth can support everybody at the
consumption level of an European or a North
American? Way back in 1908, India's Mahatma
Gandhi had asked, "if it took Britain the exploitation
of half the globe to be what it is today, how many
globes would India need?"
It is the responsibility of Northern environ­
mental groups to impress upon their leaders that
they must not approach the North-South environ­
mental dialogue in a spirit of oneupmanship, with a
view to win some cheap votes back home. But with
a view to build a better future for all humanity in
which all can live in ecological and economic secu­
rity as proud and equal human beings.

Southern vision
Equally, the leaders of the poor have a responsibil­
ity to use this occasion to forcefully put forward
their own world view — how do they want to see an

interdependent, fair and caring world developed?
The South also has a lesson to learn. While
telling the North bluntly that it is the Southern
peoples' lifestyles and cultures that have kept the
world's ecological fabric intact, it must also re­
nounce theNorthern consumptive lifestyle. It must
get rid of poverty but it must also stand for the
integration, in its modem living, of the ecological
prudence of its traditional lifestyles. The South
must not go to UNCED to learn but also to teach.
Nor must it go to beg. UNCED is a forum where it
must go to demand a fair and rightful space in the
lap of Mother Earth.

Participatory democracy
It is our firm belief that the key issue behind the
growing environmental concern is participatory
democracy — a political and economic system in
which all citizens of a nation or a globe can effec­
tively participate in its ongoing governance.
It was the environmental movement in the North
which first challenged the overarching claims to
legitimacy of political systems based on representa­
tive democracy. During the 1970s and 1980s, thou­
sands of young men and women protested against
their democratically elected governments on the
siting of nuclear power stations. These people es­
sentially wanted a deepening of the democratic
process. Simply because certain people had been
elected by majority, they argued, was not enough to
give them the untramelled right to decide how the
local environment could be used without the con­
sent of the people who were worst affected by this
decision. Citizen participation in environmental
decision-making has since become accepted as a
basic tenet of the Northern environmental move­
ment — as the ultimate safeguard of people's envi­
ronmental needs and rights.
In the South too, the environmental movement
has repeatedly asserted the rights of the people over
their immediate environment — to manage, use
and care for. It is this concern that needs to be
carried further if we want to see a fairer and greener
world.
In the following paragraphs, we present elements of
a system of global environmental governance based, not
on targetsand objectives, baton basic human rights—a
form of governance in which natural resource use will be
controlled by a system of democratic checks and balances,
and in which individuals, communities and nations have
been effectively empowered to protect, manage and use
their resources in a fair and democratic manner. We hope
the people of the world will see in them a vision ofa better
future.

II
Elements of Global Environmental
Democracy

nvironmental problems, for the sake of
simplicity, can be divided into two
categories:
1. Those that are mainly amenable to
community management; and,
2. Those that are mainly amenable to global man­
agement.
Within the first category lie problems such as
soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, water
pollution, air pollution, and protection of nature
parks, sanctuaries and areas of biodiversity. Local
communities are capable of determining and man­
aging systems of environmental protection and
sustainable use that can help to ameliorate such
problems. This, however, does not mean that
these problems can be left entirely to local commu­
nities to solve. National and global support systems
have to play a crucial role in making community
management effective.
The second category includes the pollution of
global commons like the oceans, atmosphere and
Antarctica, international trade in toxic wastes and
hazardous substances, and compensation for the
ecological costs of producing internationally traded
commodities. The action framework for solving
these problems will have to be evolved at the
global level, though national and community ac­
tion will play an important role in implementing the
proposed global solutions.

E

New concepts of citizenship
Setting up systems of community management, on
one hand, and of global management, on theother,
means that the existing nation-states must give up
some of their sovereignty to the village republic, in
the first case and a global republic, in the second. We
must,therefore, promote new concepts of citizen­
ship if we want to manage the emerging environ­
mental problems of the world. We can no longer
regard ourselves merely as citizens of a particular
nation-state but also as citizens of a community, on
one ha nd, and citizens ofa common globe, on the other.
The need to develop living forms of community
citizenship and global citizenship — mediated, of
course, by national citizenship—is inevitable. Wher­
ever national bureaucracies have taken over the
management role that was earlier discharged by

local communities, systems of traditional govern­
ance over natural resources have declined, local
communities have been alienated, and environ­
mental resources have suffered from a free for all
in their use and faced consequent degradation.
Simultaneously, at the global level, the world mar­
ket economy has become moreand more integrated
in its use of the world's ecological resources. But the
world's fragmented political system has failed to
promote any organised form of global citizenship
in which we care not just for our own nation but for
the world as a whole. The result is increasing
misuse and overuse of the global commons and
erratic and unjust trading patterns, in which world
prices are determined by short term market consid­
erations rather than long term ecological costs. What
we see is the phenomenon of 'market failure' on a
global scale — a market which fails to take into
account both the interests of future generations and
that of the poverty-stricken people living today.
But in any democratic framework, citizenship is
built upon a system of both rights and duties. Only in
a dictatorship do citizens only haveobligationsbut
no rights. All citizens in a democracy are expected
to discharge their obligations, like paying taxes,
but they also have corresponding rights which are
legally enforceable and keep governments, com­
mercial enterprises and other citizens within a
framework of fair play. In most democracies, even
laws enacted by a legislature can be challenged
and struckdown byacourtof lawasunfairand un­
constitutional. Today, there is a growing and urgent
need to define environmental rights for all of us, as
global, national and community citizens, in order for us
to discharge our global, national and community obliga­
tions.

Towards a global compact
This statement puts forward a set of ideas that can form
the basis of a truly global compact for human survival
on a fair and equitable basis. It sets out an agenda of
rights for all of us as community, national and
global citizens — a set of national and global
commitments that both Southern and Northern
countries must make — so that all of us can move
towards a framework of environmental govern­
ance that will give 'sustainable and equitable devel­

6

opment' a real chance to succeed.
The 1972 conference put the subject of environ­
mental management on the world agenda. The 1992
conference, building upon the global experience of
the last 20 years, should spell out and create a
political consensus for the framework that will help
us manage the planet over the next 20 years. Indeed,
having recognised that nature puts limits tohuman

actions, consumption and growth, the central ques­
tion is how are we going to manage the world s
limited resources for all humankind in an environmentally-sound, just, equitous and peaceful man­
ner?
That is the challenge before the 1992 conference.
And it is only by this yardstick can its success or
failure be judged.

1.
Community Environmental Democracy:
The community's right to manage its
immediate environment through open
and democratic institutions
I

rjn he 1980s saw a growing worldwide aware1 ness of the ecological crisis, which also
brought forth an enormous popular response. NGOs,
government agencies and numerous individuals
tried to improve their environment and to protect it
from further degradation.
Probably the most important lesson learnt
during the 1980s is that it ispossible to protect the en­
vironment and regenerate its productivity as long
as people's participation is ensured. Numerous
projects across the developing world revealed that
environmental regeneration efforts can greatly help
to improve the productivity of the local land, and
water resources and enhance local biomass
availability to meet basic human needs. In several of
these projects, not only did people improve their
local subsistence economy but also their marketoriented cash economy on a sustainable basis. Some
projects have shown remarkable cost-benefit re­
turns.
Bu t these projects have also shown that the inte­
grated development of village environmental re­
sources is no t a mere technocratic exercise in vol ving

soil conservation techniques and choices of fast
growing trees and grass species. It demands com­
plex social and legal changes to ensure people's
control over their natural resources and the creation
of open, democratic and participatory community
institutions. Even in several industrialised coun­
tries, local au thori ties are now playing an increasing
role in environmental management.
If investments in land, water and forest re­
sources are to bear fruit, it is vital that an all out
effort be made to strengthen democracy at the grass­
roots, especially a form of democracy that is not
built upon the principles of representative democ­
racy but upon the principles of participatory de­
mocracy. Environmental regeneration programmes
demand participatory and democratic institutions
at the community level, particularly because the
environmental resources that we seek to regenerate
like trees, grasslands and local water harvesting
systems in the villages of the developing world are
all extremely fragile resources. And these resources
can only be managed by institutions at the commu­
nity level in which community members have con­

7

fidence and which gives them all a fair deal, across
income groups and genders.

Of course, the character of democratic village
level institutions will vary from one culture to an­
other and, therefore, no uniform formula can be
devised. Similarly, not all management of natural
resources can take place at the level of a community
or a settlement. There will also be a need for multi­
settlement intermediate tiers to deal with certain en­
vironmental management objectives.
Obviously, all this is an area for massive experi­
mentation but sooner this experimentation can begin,
tlie better it will be for improving environmental
management in the rural developing world. In this
challenge, of course, countries can learn a lot from
their own traditions and practices, especially those
that were prevalent for the management of common
property resources. A number of urban problems,
especially those which deal with local environmental
problemsand provision of basic services and ameni­
ties, also demand community management and
control.

A large part of the financial resources that are
being made available for environmental manage­
ment or are likely to become available in the future
should go directly to these community institutions.
All nations at the Brazil conference must take a pledge
that they will develop a new tier of governance within
their countries — a tier of community level governance
through open, participatory institutions with inalienable
rights over their immediate environment to care for, use
and manage.
The 21st century problem of managing natural
resources at high levels of productivity but on an
ecologically-friendly basis cannot be solved by 19th
century centralised, undemocratic bureaucracies,
many of which were created in the developing
world during an exploitative colonial period.
Sustainability becomes a resource management
objective only in a political order in which decisions
are taken by those who suffer the consequences of
their decisions. Village communities, when given
control over their immediate natural resource
base, have often shown remarkable resilience and
sagacity in managing it on a sustainable basis.

2.
National Environmental Democracy:
The right to a clean and healthy environment

.

11 governments must provide their citizens

A witha justiciable right toa clean andhealthy

environment. Itis absolutely vital thatevery citizen
in the world should have the right to challenge any
decision that affects his or her immediate environ­
ment.
In India, a major step was undertaken when en­
vironmental litigation was permitted as a matter of
fundamental right of all Indian citizens. The most
important contribution of the Supreme Court of
India during the 1980s was to recognise that all
individuals and public spirited groups have the

right to file cases of public interest in a court of law,
and, secondly, drawing strength from the consti­
tutionally guaranteed Right to Life, to extend it to
include a legally guaranteed and justiciable right to
a clean and healthy environment. This has greatly
strengthened the right of citizens who can now
appeal against projects that are likely to threaten
them. Given these rights, a number of cases have
been filed in India which deal with environmental
problems created by mining, urban development,
encroachment of green spaces, construction of dams,
deforestation and threats to national parks.

3.
Global Environmental Democracy:
A fair world in which all pay the full costs of their
consumption

The Global Right to Survival
he Right to Survival — with a certain modi___ cum of dignity — is the most fundamental of
all human rights. But, unfortunately, this is one
right that a large part of humankind does not enjoy
today.
Poverty and its associated evil, unemploy­
ment,stalk alargepartofhumanityand forceitinto
a state of deprivation that constitutes an unpardon­
able blot on its conscience. There can be no honest
and moral discussion of international environmental
solidarity as long as the world remains starkly di­
vided between the rich and the poor — between
those who enjoy the resources of the earth and can
worry about its future and those who have to scrape
the soil for less than bare survival today. A large
part of the world's poor actually live in the world's
most ecologically degraded regions. The threat of
impoverishment and consequently the demand for
jobs in these regions is at its maximum during
periods of natural crises like droughts.
The vast ’ numbers of the unemployed and
underemployed in the developing world provide
us with an extraordinary opportunity for undertak­
ing a massive global initiative for ecological regen­
eration and restoration of the natural resource base
on which the poor depend for their survival. Eco­
nomic security today can become the very basis ofecologi­
cal security tomorrow. All over South America, Africa
and Asia, village communities must improve their
local agroecosystems through afforestation, grass­
land development, soil conservation, local water
harvesting and small scale energy development.
Most of these are extremely labour intensive activi­
ties. Therefore, if employment can be generated on
a worldwide basis in the regeneration of the envi­

ronment, the two evils of poverty and ecological
degradation can be arrested and hopefully ban­
ished.
An internationally guaranteed Right to Sur­
vival should be accepted and enacted for the
world's poor — the poor who today flee as
ecological refugees from the barren hills of the
Himalayan mountains, the semi-arid to arid re­
gions of India's central highlands, the degraded
slopes of the Andes, the drought devastated soils of
the Sahel, and the waterlogged and flood affected
plains of Bangladesh. Those who stay behind are
forced to work the soil for daily survival and have
no time, energy or money, to undertake the rebuild­
ing of their devastated ecological capital.
If an internationally guaranteed Right to
Survival was backed up with an appropriate pro­
gramme which guaranteed jobs in ecological re­
generation, albeit at a survival wage, people need
not flee from their homes when drought or any
other adversity strikes. They can stay to build a
better future.
Such a programme would not make every­
body rich but it would definitely put a floor to pov­
erty. Everyone will be ensured a survival wage so
that they have the purchasing power to eat.
Nobody has to sell off their cattle and other assets
in acute distress. Nobody has to go to bed hungry.
What would be tire overall impact of such an
internationally guaranteed Right to Survival on the
rural South ?
One, it would drastically weaken the forces
that engender rural oppression by freeing people
from the clutches of moneylenders and landlords;
Two, it would create the possibility of millions

9

of sustainable livelihoods in what are today
ecologically devastated lands, and thus increase
food security for the world's poorest;
Three, it would improve the lot of poor
children by reducing the penurious conditions that
force parents to put their children to work; and,
Four, if the greening of the land was indeed
successful, it would reduce the work burden on
women, create conditions in which the girl child
can go to school and engender conditions that can
bring about a fall in population growth rates while
increasing female literacy.
The proposed global survival programme can
also make an enormous contribution to solving
some of the so-called global environmental prob­
lems. For instance, the programme would lead to
the greening of the land in a big way and thereby
the fixation of a significant amount of the carbon
that has already accumulated in the atmosphere. It
would also prepare developing countries and their
people to deal with the threat of global warming.
Tempera ture and rainfall varia tions would be easier
to live with in green lands than in barren ones, and
there would a longer period available to adjust.
Without this improvement, societies living in bare
and degraded lands will immediately find them­
selves in an emergency. Moreover, the proposed
programme would help to take pressure off the
remaining wildlands and areas of rich genetic di­
versity. There is an enormous amount of work still
to be done in finding ways to reduce the population
pressure on areas of rich genetic diversity. The
pressure cannot be reduced by putting fences around
these areas. Creating employment in the degraded
fringe areas would help to transfer the focus of
human activity and needs to areas outside those
with rich genetic diversity.

Mechanisms to finance a global survival
programme
A programme for a global Right to Survival could
be financed either through compulsory and assessed
state contribu tions based on the weal th of a country
(for example, as proposed by India's former Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi to set up a Planet Protection
Fund with official contributions equal to 0.1 percent
of each country's GNP) or through an international
tax which could be levied on individuals in the
form of an international income tax or an interna­
tional consumption tax.
In every civilised country in the 20th century,
there is a progressive income tax so that the rich pay

to su pport the poor. Unfortunately, as a communi ty
of nations we are still not a civilised group. At the
global level, transfer of funds from the rich to
support the poor is only in the form of aid and
charity, not in the form of a legal obligation which
has to be met under threat of punitive action.
We can move towards a global society if we
were to tax the rich to support the poor. This tax
ought to be levied on all the rich people of the
world regardless of whether they come from the
North or the South. But, of course, given the eco­
nomic realities of the world, a large part of this
income tax will obviously be collected in the
North.
The North could come to an understanding
with the South, as a major global bargain, that this
tax will be given only to those countries which
develop clear community institutions which will
manage local natural resources and the money will
be transferred through national governments to
community institutions.
Based on the Indian experience, we estimate
that the amount of money required for this entire
task would be around US$ 30-40 billion a year.
Compared to the one trillion dollar a year expendi­
ture that is made on the military worldwide, and
the peace dividend that is expected from arms re­
duction in Europe alone, this sum is extremely
small. But it will relieve an enormous amount of the
remaining tension in the world.
The rich are duty bound to pay this tax not
merely as a matter of morali ty but also as a matter of
global ecological solidarity. The rich of the world
hardly pay the full ecological costs of their con­
sumption which is externalised and often borne by
the poor.
This tax should, therefore, not be seen as a measure
of charity but more as a measure of the payments that the
rich ought to be making for their existing consumption.
Environmental economics teaches us that we all
must pay the true cost of our consumption, includ­
ing the ecological costs. Hardly anybody amongst
the world's rich pays the full ecological costs oftheir
consumption. It is vital that this money be returned
to the poor in the form of an international tax.
What impact will all this have on the economies
of the rich countries? Most of the revenue from this tax
will go back to the Northern countries, at least in the
initial years, to buy food, and over time the revenue
thus raised will only lead to a greater demand in the
developing world for products from industrialised
countries. Therefore, this is not a plan that is going
to devastate Northern economies. It will only
create a more stable and a more prosperous eco­
nomic order across the world.

10

A Global Right to Information
~ eopleliving in modern democracies are es___ sentially safeguarded from harm by a free
flow of information. Knowledge is the basis of the
modern global enterprise. Bureaucracies and com­
mercial enterprises are able to pollute rivers, de­
stroy forests and mine the land only aslong as they
can keep the information about their adverse
impacts secret or away from the public eye.
Even in the Western world, many environmen­
talists still feel that there isn't adequate access to
information that threatens the environment or
people's health. This was, in fact, a major reason
why the environment was consistently neglected
and devastated in Eastern Europe under the erst­
while communist regimes. Not surprisingly, eco­
logical groups in all these countries joined the anti­
communist revolt.

Stronger pollution control provisions in the
Westmeans thatnumerous polluting and danger­
ous industries will now try to move to the South.
Within the South itself there are serious problems
of a dual society. Information rarely reaches those
people who end up suffering the impact of pollu­
tion. It is absolutely vital that each country in the
world enact a right to information, particularly
relating to projects and programmes that affect the
environment and people's health.
This should also be an international right, en­
shrined in a legally binding treaty so that any
company, government agency or multilateral
institution which is acting abroad can be forced to
release any information relating to its own activities
or of its subsidiaries or associated institutions, which
threatens people's health or environment.

Equal Rights to the Atmosphere
he proposed global climate convention must
___ acknowledge equal rightsof all individuals
on earth to the use of the atmosphere and historical
responsibilities for the damage that has been done
to date — in other words, the environmental debt of
the industrialised countries.
In the ongoing negotiations for a convention to
reduce emissions and preserve carbon sinks, little
effort has been made to allocate national responsi­
bility in a way that correctly accounts for the past,
present and future warming effects of national
emissions. Different methodologies have been pro­
posed to estimate na tional responsibilities for green­
house gas emissions. Apart from the problem of an
inadequate and as yet inaccurate data base, these
methodologies result in dramatically different re­
sults depending on the political inclinations of the
researchers involved. While one US study argues
that industrialised countries have already used up
their entire quota for carbon dioxide emissions,
another has tried to put nearly half the blame for
global warming on developing countries. Clearly,
the interpretation of the science of global warming
has become intensely political. The South must
develop its own understanding of the problem with
its own science, its own arithmetic and its own
analysis of its causes and its solutions. This view­
point must be articulated clearly to world leaders
in international fora and to the NGOs.
Once the world scientific community has reached
a consensus on the aggregate level of greenhouse
gas emissions that can be considered annually per­
missible on a global basis—whether this is based on

an estimate of the natural sinks or not — this global
aggregate should be allocated to each individual
equitably, each nation's quota thus being equal to
the sum of its citizens' quotas.
Entitlements thus created can be traded. Those
not using their shares can sell them to those that are
exceeding theirs. With an economic incentive at­
tached to preserving carbon reservoirs and limit­
ing emissions and an economic disincentive attached
to increasing emissions, everyone will have a
vested interest in averting global warming. A
country which today earns money by felling forests
may choose to earn money by keeping i ts forests and
trading its unused share of emissions.
It is argued that increasing population will give
certain nations an advantage under this scheme. To
overcome this, national quotas could be frozen
according to the world population distribution at
the time of agreement. Then those nations which
reduce their population in the future will get higher
per capita entitlements and those which increase
their populations will get lower entitlements per
person.
In order to avoid creating a licence to pollute,
the international community should impose penal­
ties on nations whose emissions exceed the maxi­
mum permissible limits even after extra credits
obtained through emissions trading have been taken
into account. The revenues thus generated should
be used to promote renewable energy, efficient
energy production, and global warming ameliora­
tion measures, especially in countries likely to be
affected by global warming.

11

Such a scheme should be attractive to all civil­
ised nations because:
it sets into operation the polluter pays principle,
which is already accepted by most developed
countries as a way to tackle pollution problems;
b) it is consistent with the norms of human rights
and equality;
c) it is a system built on rights, not on aid or
charity or undue and unequal obligations; and,
d) it operates as a market based mechanism giv­
ing everyone a vested interest in the atmos­
phere rather than relying on the efficacy of
regulations, punitive sanctions and interna­
tional law.
a)

The developing world is being accused of reck­
lessness, even environmental blackmail, for its
refusal to be pressurised into signing up to global
obligations formulated by the North. This smear
must be wiped away by the leaders of the South
with a forceful presentation of a system of global
resource management that starts from a demand for
basic equal rights and recognition of responsibility
for the creation of the problem. The South should
not be again seen as holding out the begging bowl
for "new and additional resources" or calling for
"technology transfer". The South should be de­
manding compensatory measures from the North
for errant behaviour as a question of its right over
global resources.

Appropriate Compensation for
Community Biological Knowledge
ost of the centres of origin and diversity for
___ the world's major food crops and pharma­
ceuticals are located in the developing world. The
value of the South's germplasm to the agriculture
and pharmaceuticals industries of the North runs
into many billions of dollars a year. This massive
contribution to the feeding and health of the devel­
oped world is rooted in the systematic transfer of
genetic materials, often by stealth, from the maize
and potatoes that the Spanish brought back from
America to the well documented cases of rubber,
coffee and bananas.
The West has promoted the idea that biodiver­
sity is the common heritage of humankind and that
there should be free access to genetic resources. So
far, free access has meant just that — the farmers
and tribals of the South have received no reward or
compensation for the generations of toil, skill and
knowledge that their communities have vested in
the protection of natural diversity and the cultiva­
tion of selected crops and other products.
Even though there has been discussions in in­
ternational fora like FAO about the concept of farm­
ers' rights, this has yet to be backed up with hard
cash or legal protection against the exploitation of
their traditional knowledge. Yet, at the same time,
industrialised countries are pressing hard in the
GATT forum and elsewhere for the greater protec­
tion and enforceability of corporate and private in­
tellectual property rights, including patents over
genetic materials. Many of these have come from
the developing world in the first place.
We have seen that once property rights have
been created in favour of companies, the govern­
ments of the North plead that there is no way that
they can interfere with private sector interests when

it comes to issues like a call for technology transfer.
Yet there are no such qualms when it comes to
demandi ng free access to the property of the Sou th's
farmers and tribals. In the negotiations for a bio­
diversity convention, these double standards are
writ large and the high sounding plea of the com­
mon heritage of humankind is a rhetorical device to
disguise the continued exploitation of the poorer
countries and their farmers.
Talk of a convention focuses on the need to set
aside areas of special biodiversity and to ensure
continued open access to all who may want to use
the materials to be found there. The proponents talk
of fair compensation, but only in terms of fees for
management of these fenced off areas. No one has
yet proposed a proper compensation for the real
value of the genetic resources themselves and the
traditional knowledge of their uses that is associ­
ated with them.
Genetic materials are vital to human welfare
and development. With a growing interest in green
products, the traditional biological knowledge will
be increasingly sought after for a variety of pur­
poses — from food to drugs and cosmetics. If there
is to be a global system of checks and balances to
ensure that biological diversity is maintained, it
will be workable only if it respects the rights of
sovereign states to develop their resources in accor­
dance with their aspirations for national develop­
ment. This involves ensuring that a proper value
is attached to genetic reesources and to traditional
knowledge. This is not only equitable, it is also
sound economics. Developing countries must not
sign the biodiversity convention unless it reduces
the existing asymmetries in access to knowledge
and technology.

CSE
Publications
THE STATE OF INDIA'S ENVIRONMENT- 3
A CITIZENS' REPORT
FLOODS, FLOOD PLAINS AND ENVIRONMENTAL MYTHS
Rs. 350/-

USS 25

THE STATE OF INDIA'S ENVIRONMENT- 2
A CITIZENS' REPORT
RS. 320/-

USS 40 (OUT OF PRINT)

THE STATE OF INDIA'S ENVIRONMENT - 1
THE FIRST CITIZENS' REPORT
RS. 100/-

USS 15

TEMPLES OR TOMBS? DECISIONS IN THREE
ENVIRONMENT CONTROVERSIES
RS. 60/-

USS 15

THE WRATH OF NATURE - IMPACT OF ENVIRON­
MENTAL DESTRUCTION ON FLOODS AND DROUGHTS
RS. 28/-

USS 5

FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL - PEOPLE'S ACTION FOR
ENVIRONMENT
RS. 60/-

USS 15

TOWARDS GREEN VILLAGES - A STRATEGY
FOR ENVIRONMENTALLY SOUND AND
PARTICIPATORY RURAL DEVELOPMENT
RS. 60/-

US$10

GLOBAL WARMING IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD:
A CASE OF ENVIRONMENTAL COLONIALISM
RS. 30/-

USS 4 + COLLECTION CHARGES USS 2

GREEN FILM GUIDE - A CATALOGUE OF VIDEO
FILMS ON THE ENVIRONMENT
RS. 30/-

USS 4 + COLLECTION CHARGES USS 2

Centre for Science and Environment
F-6, Kailash Colony, New Delhi 110048

Humanity never needed a global social contract more than it does
today. The forthcoming United Nations Conference on Environ­
ment and Development to be held in Brazil, with probably over a
hundred world leaders and over a thousand non-governmental
groups in attendance, provides us with an historic opportunity to
formulate precisely such a global contract. With the the nations of
the world jointly facing a global ecological crisis but sharply
divided in economic terms and with possibilities for conflict
immense, there never was a greater need for humanity to live as
one.
We present in this publication elements of a system of global en­
vironmental governance based, not on targets and objectives, but
on basic human rights — a form of governance in which natural
resource use will be controlled by a system of democratic checks
and balances, and in which individuals, communities and nations
have been effectively empowered to protect, manage and use their
resources in a fair and democratic manner. We hope the people of
the world will see in them a vision of a better future.

The Centre for Science and Environment
proposes to submit the statement to UNCED.
In case you agree with our proposals,
we would be delighted if you could
send us your endorsement.
Looking forward to your reply,
Anil Agarwal
Sunita Narain
Gita Kavarana
Dinesh Kumar
Rakesh Kapoor
Anjani Khanna
Koshy Cherail
Robert Wilkinson
Ranjan Basu
Leena Bhanot
Media
THE CSE STATEMENT.pdf

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