Miriam Lang

by Miriam Lang

With COP16 underway in Cali, Colombia, Miriam Lang highlights the risk of focusing on biodiversity credits as a solution to preserving biodiversity may preclude discussions of a transformative politics outside of a market-based logic. What is needed is a change of the very logic that drives environmental politics at all levels towards one that foregrounds relational worldviews, care and reciprocity with nature instead of the patriarchal, modern impulse to commodify, dominate, and destroy it.

From October 21 to November 1, the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) on
biodiversity will take place in Cali, Colombia. The COP is the governing body of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an international treaty adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Colombian government titled this edition of the biannual event “The COP of the people and reconciliation.” The official slogan “Peace with Nature” invites us to “rethink an economic model that does not prioritize the extraction, overexploitation and pollution of nature.” A heated dispute is announced between a concerned and mobilized civil society, in which, in addition to the environmentalist movement, indigenous peoples and their organizations stand out; a host government that has declared the country a “world power of life” and at least discursively, has shown itself to be the most pro-environmental Latin American government; and, finally, a multilateral process that has already opened the doors in a big way to companies, banks and investment funds. These actors hope that biodiversity credits – analogous to carbon credits – that can be traded internationally to supposedly compensate for biodiversity loss will be standardized. But what are the implications and consequences of this conversion of the fabric of life itself into a commodity?

When it comes to protecting life, no sacrifice, no cost can be exaggerated. Strangely, when it comes to protecting the fabric that makes life possible, that complex planetary ecosystem that we are a part of and depend on, this perspective seems to change. Multiple localized environmental disasters – heat waves, droughts and fires, deluges and floods – claim multiple lives, both human and non-human, on a daily basis. Many experts warn that the accelerated loss of biodiversity we are witnessing constitutes the sixth great extinction, this time caused exclusively by human activities. However, the hard threshold that distinguishes the “feasible” from the “impossible” in global environmental policy today, what guides decisions, is not the ecological or political effectiveness of a measure, but its profitability.

According to Andre Standing of the Transnational Institute, “Conservation finance has become the dominant ideology of most of the world’s biggest environmental NGOs. It is also heavily promoted by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union.” The author explains that “the basic premise of conservation finance is that saving nature and averting the climate crisis requires enormous funds, but money derived from public and philanthropic grants is woefully insufficient. (…) To do this, saving nature must be turned into a profit-making endeavour, appealing to what are known as ‘impact investors’..”

A radical shift in global environmental policy

In just a few decades, global environmental policy has taken a fundamental turn. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was an arena in which emerging environmental groups and movements fought against large polluting corporations, making use of judicial and legislative powers. They achieved convictions in courts and tribunals and regulatory norms in parliaments that were committed to limiting pollution and effectively repairing the damage. But from the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s, environmental policy began to shift from the prohibition and sanction of processes of pollution or destruction of nature that exceeded certain thresholds to a policy that bet only on “mitigating damage” – focusing on voluntary actions by companies. There was a transition from a policy that declared, in the name of the common good, that certain extractive or industrial ventures were unviable, to one that allowed the advancement of most extractive or industrial projects, prioritizing the processes of capitalist accumulation over human and ecosystem health. It shifted from the use of states’ regulatory capacity to an approach in which they only generate “market incentives” for polluters to voluntarily choose to implement mitigation actions.

Historically, and in contrast to the prospect of strict environmental regulations, mitigation was always seen as the most economic growth-“friendly” approach, and there was a tendency to appeal to it in the name of “freedom.” Supposedly, there is a hierarchical sequence in mitigation actions: first you have to avoid and, if that is not possible, you must seek to minimize damage. If that is not possible either, the previously affected ecosystem must be restored. The last link in the chain is the compensation of damage. However, the experience of several decades with carbon credits shows that often offsetting emissions becomes the first option, since it is the easiest path for large companies, more aligned with the profitability imperative that governs them. Critics such as the Global Forest Coalition (GFC) point out that this is likely to happen with biodiversity credits as well. In other words, necessary transformations in production systems to reduce their impacts effectively are avoided or postponed, thus aggravating the environmental crisis.

The big business of conservation

At COP16 in Cali, not only will the state of biodiversity be assessed. It will be the first COP on biodiversity to discuss the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted during the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) in 2022. And in this context, the issue of finance has been given centrality: according to transnational organizations such as the International Institute for Sustainable Development, The Nature Conservancy and the Global Environment Facility, one of the priority objectives of the event is to close a financing gap estimated at between 200,000 and 700,000 million US dollars per year and align financial flows with the Global Biodiversity Framework.

By crossing all spheres of life, neoliberal reason has also taken over global environmental governance. What guides decisions in environmental policy today is not even the direct cost of a measure, but the expectation or not of profitability. With regard to biodiversity markets, the major players in globalised capitalism are expecting huge profits: the World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that over the next ten years, protecting nature and increasing biodiversity could generate business opportunities worth $10 trillion annually and create nearly 400 million new jobs. Investment funds such as the Boston Consulting Group even claim that globally forests would be worth up to 150 trillion dollars.

The rise of the financialization of conservation has not only transformed the way in which this phenomenon is addressed, but also the type of actors involved in the process. According to Standing, “People with backgrounds in finance, banking and business consulting are taking over the management of most of the big conservation organisations. Their governing boards are stacked with investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. Consequently, risky and opaque financial instruments, originating in financial markets, are being repurposed for environmental projects.” In the run-up to COP16, entities such as the World Economic Forum or websites such as Business for Nature are giving private companies a leading role. Framed in this same logic, the multi-stakeholder perspective that predominates today in the United Nations system has generated multiple transnational alliances between governments, banks and investment funds, large polluting companies and transnational environmental NGOs that are seen as simple “alliances of stakeholders”. The enormous asymmetries between its members are ignored and the very divergent interests that motivate them eclipsed. “Global biodiversity policy-making has increasingly allowed the very corporations responsible for environmental degradation to adopt market-based instruments, driven by strong corporate lobbying under the guise of ‘stakeholder participation’”, criticizes the Global Forest Coalition.

Compensation: a double-edged sword

This environmental policy is based on two myths that, despite being unfounded, are hegemonic in the environmental discourse: that economic growth can be “decoupled” from its impacts on nature and that it is possible to generate “win-win” solutions in the context of environmental protection – in which the environment wins and the investor wins. Euphemisms also abound. For example, we often talk about “nature-based” or “nature-positive” solutions, which in the first place means that through these solutions, nature will generate profits for investors. At the heart of the new environmental policies is the creation of credits as new commodities or “nature-based” financial assets.

A concept that was central to the creation of carbon credits and is now central to promoting biodiversity credits is that of “compensation”. To complicate things further in Latin America, in Spanish, “compensation” has a double meaning: on the one hand, “compensation” could be understood as a synonym for “recognition”. For example, as a historically just economic retribution for the care of the forest that indigenous peoples have carried out for thousands of years. But, in technical debates on carbon markets or biodiversity, the term is often used as a synonym for offsetting in the opposite sense. It is no longer the polluters who recognize those who have given care, but they absolve themselves of responsibility for the destruction they generate in a certain place, for a “compensation” payment aimed at the conservation of another place. Compensation understood as offsetting implies a spatio-temporal displacement that can be understood as a movement of externalization of responsibility: an example would be a mining company that destroys an Amazon biome in Brazil and “compensates” for this by paying money to “protect” another forest in Africa.

Clearly, this leads to several problems. One is the double land grabbing. First, the mining company appropriates the forest where it is going to mine, with negative consequences for the people who inhabited it (loss of habitat, food sovereignty, probably displacement and cultural uprooting). Secondly, the same mining company also appropriates the other space where it intends to compensate for this negative impact. Colonial and fortress conservation schemes predominate, which think of the protection of forests as protected areas or forests without people, expelling communities that live in interaction with the forest. This is a particularly sensitive issue, as it is scientifically proven that it is the modes of living of indigenous peoples, forest dwellers and local communities that best protect biodiversity – although the hegemonic discourse often accuses them of the opposite. Indigenous territories include more than one-third of the world’s intact forest landscapes (forest ecosystems that show little sign of habitat conversion or fragmentation). And deforestation in recognized indigenous territories is significantly slower than in other territories.

Standardize the epitome of diversity?

Second, the policy of offsetting – whether carbon or biodiversity – is highly questioned for its multiple levels of opacity. There has been a controversy for years about whether biotic carbon can offset the carbon emitted by industrial processes. Similarly, many scientists question the assumption that the biodiversity in one place can be considered “equivalent” to the biodiversity elsewhere. In other words, if the damage caused by an extractive project in a certain place can effectively be equivalent to the improvement or gain of biodiversity in another, distant place – the compensation place – which is the basis of legitimacy for this conservation strategy. Most ecologists admit that the substitutes used for this bargaining are grotesque simplifications of ecological relationships and non-human nature.

Biodiversity is defined as the variability of living organisms from any source, including but not limited to terrestrial and marine ecosystems and other aquatic ecosystems, and the ecological complexes of which they are a part: this includes diversity within each species, between species and the diversity of ecosystems. Obviously, this is not easy to quantify, and it is even more difficult to argue for ecological equivalence between components of biodiversity that differ in their type, location, and/or ecological context. The irony here is that biodiversity, the epitome of diversity, is forcibly subjected to a process of unification or standardization across a variety of metrics, in order to be transformed into a homogeneous and viable asset for finance capital.

In order to globalize biodiversity markets that are currently experimental (something that many intend to do at COP16 in Cali), these scientific questions would have to be discarded and a political agreement would have to be reached on what would be the appropriate metrics to calculate selected attributes of nature lost and gained and quantify “substitutes” or proxies (e.g., habitat variables) that can be combined and taken as representative of global biodiversity. This would supposedly make it possible to compare the damage caused to ecosystems in one place (the place of an extractive or productive investment) with the gains obtained elsewhere (the place of compensation), thus forcing an equivalence between the two.

From a political economy perspective, it can be observed that the capitalist valorization of biodiversity or its social production as an appropriable resource or marketable commodity for the purposes of capital accumulation involves a series of steps: from the production of specific aligned scientific knowledge to agreements of a political and ideological nature. And finally, for that valorization to work, for a country to be able to report its progress to the UN or for a company to be able to advertise a product as “neutral on biodiversity loss”, credibility needs to be built. This is where what is called “measurement, reporting and verification” comes into play – which is another very controversial field in the scientific debate.

This brings us to a third problem with biodiversity credits. It is highly uncertain whether they will be effective in protecting the biodiversity that actually exists. A scandal that erupted in 2023 around carbon credits suggest that: several studies showed that their effect on reducing deforestation was zero in most of the cases studied and that certifying companies had inflated baselines. In such a way, the result could easily even be an increase in net emissions since those had supposedly been “offset”, in a context of high vulnerability of the verification methods applicable in such complex matters.

But despite these many doubts, the United States and the European Union have included compensation for biodiversity losses in their environmental legislation. It is normally included in the framework of the approval of large projects in the context of environmental impact studies. In addition, voluntary biodiversity markets, which already exist on an experimental basis in 64 countries around the world, allow large companies and financial institutions to reduce their operational risks. Offsets help companies with significant ecological footprints maintain their legal and social licenses, (deceptively) improve their image, and reduce credit risk.

Biodiversity policy and indigenous peoples

There is a broad consensus on the critical role of indigenous peoples, pastoralists, artisanal fishers, peasants and Afro-descendant communities in the effective conservation of biodiversity. Most indigenous peoples have lived in reciprocity with forests of great biodiversity and have actively cared for them for thousands of years, practically without money or similar means of exchange, due to their modes of living based on hunting, gathering and small-scale farm farming in rotating places. This extraordinary capacity is based on a different philosophical understanding of the relationship between society and nature, which places humans not above, but as an interdependent part of their environment. It is significant that, although they are mostly not completely disconnected from capitalism or outside of it, these peoples do not live “for” capitalism, they are not subject to the imperatives of accumulation. Today, money is still not central to their reproduction, even though it contributes to it to an increasing extent. This is due to the bioprecariousness that results from the multiple onslaughts of the capitalist world on their territories: both the expansion of the frontiers of extractivist destruction and the epistemic violence that labels their philosophies as “beliefs” and their modes of living as backward, primitive and “to be overcome”, instead of recognizing them as truly sustainable.

There are those who see biodiversity markets as an opportunity for indigenous peoples. However, a systematic analysis of the 2023 voluntary biodiversity markets concludes that none of the programmes examined were developed by indigenous people, that most programmes did not set comprehensive requirements for obtaining free, prior and informed consent, nor did they involve models of co-ownership, partnership or benefit-sharing with communities. Another problem is that the technicalities and opacities that characterize these markets and their volatility in the financial markets prevent peasant, indigenous or forestry communities from knowing with certainty who they are dealing with and under what conditions.

There is a high risk that in the context of COP16, the hype generated around biodiversity credits will prevent attendants from discussing politics that, outside of markets, can be truly effective in preserving biodiversity, and that reposition sustaining life at the center of the scene. That such important issues as the possibility of strong public regulation of polluting productive activities and extractivism are marginalized from the debate; or a transformation of the global agri-food model towards agroecology; or actions to restore degraded forests and ecosystems that generate direct employment for local communities and not for those who work in the world of finance. Today we need politics that, instead of trying to “include” indigenous peoples in the logic of profitability so that they become shareholders of their own territories, bet on strengthening their modes of living on their own terms, to rebuild and restore their material bases of reproduction and knowledge. Politics that recognize their historical contribution and address the need for reparations, both material and structural, for centuries of grievance, violence and destruction.

It remains to be seen to what extent the host of this COP16, Colombian Minister of Environment Susana Muhamad Gonzalez and the broad social basis of the Colombian government, even intend to divert or succeed in disturbing the expected move toward the commodification of biodiversity. For now, it is important that organized society and ecologist movements do not simply delegate the protection of our web of life to UN-spaces, corporations and banks. Beyond advocacy work, multi-scale action is at the order of the day, beginning at the territorial level and in our subjectivities, to build barriers against the imperatives of profitability. Peoples-to-peoples initiatives that prefigurate how environmental justice and climate reparations can be built in practice across continents, horizontally and in a perspective of an eco-territorial internationalism are needed, to show effective pathways of direct action beyond the complex multilateral arena. A change of the very logic that drives environmental politics today is necessary at all levels, one that foregrounds relational worldviews, care and reciprocity with Nature instead of the patriarchal, modern impulse to dominate and destroy it. Even the idea of “conservation” itself should be called into question, as it remits more to a thing than to a living subject with which humans have to urgently re-relate. That might all seem difficult at first glance. But when it comes to protecting life, no sacrifice, no challenge can be exaggerated.

Originally published at: https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/peace-with-nature-cop16-in-cali-and-the-defense-of-biodiversity/

by Miriam Lang

On Sunday 7 February 2021, not only presidential elections took place in Ecuador. Cuenca, the third-largest city in the South American country, voted against a series of mega-mining projects in the headwaters of five rivers that supply the urban area with water. In the area, which is directly adjacent to a national park that has been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, there are over 4,000 large and small bodies of water in the sensitive Páramo ecosystem, which acts as a reservoir in the Andes. Nevertheless, corporations from Canada, Australia, Peru, Chile, etc. had already been granted a total of 43 concessions for the mining of various metals. Fourteen grassroots organizations had launched the referendum, approved by the Constitutional Court in September 2020, via the Cuenca City Council. On Sunday, over 80% of the electorate voted in favor of a ban for industrial mining in this part of the Andean highlands. A clear democratic mandate in line with the 2008 constitution, which stipulates the rights of nature.

Since the result of the referendum is legally binding under the constitution, the next president will have to implement it. Many of the 16 presidential candidates had clearly opted for an expansion of mining in the election campaign in order to lead the country out of the economic crisis. Only one of them has spoken out clearly against mining and an expansion of the oil frontier in the Amazon region: Yaku Perez Guartambel, the candidate of the indigenous movement and its political organization Pachakutik.
The presidential election will not be finally decided until a final ballot on April 11th. The political heir to ex-president Rafael Correa, Andrés Arauz, who received 32.2% of the votes in the first round, will certainly take part in April. But who will be his opponent is still fought over: after 99,31 % of the votes had been counted, Perez Guartambel (20,10%) was just ahead of the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso (19,50%) with 0,6 % of the votes – a tight scenario which still can bring surprises.

For the first time in the country’s history, an indigenous candidate who comes from grassroots organizations has a chance of winning the election. This is already an enormous symbolic success for the indigenous movement of Ecuador, which last made headlines in October 2019 with an uprising against the liberalization of gasoline and diesel prices and the current Moreno government’s neoliberal policies. If Perez actually makes it to the final ballot, the election campaign will confront two different interpretations of what is defined as left in Latin America: one, a populist and authoritarian left in the wake of Rafael Correa who was in power from 2007 to 2017 and relied on an expansion of extractivism to finance infrastructure modernization and social programs. These programs promised more equality, but at the price of the destruction of nature and a de facto restriction of democratic rights. And two, an intercultural, plural, and ecological left that primarily appeals to the younger generations, puts issues such as climate change and the preservation of the rainforests at the forefront and refers to the great indigenous movement of the 90s and their communitarian form of politics. In this sense, the surge of Perez, ex-prefect of Cuenca, brings a breath of fresh air into the stale polarization between the old progressive left (represented by Arauz) and the most reactionary right (represented by Lasso) in a region in much need of political innovation.

But a broad international defamation campaign against Yaku Perez has started right away on election night, using media and international structures installed in previous years around the vision of a ‘socialism of the 21st century’. Especially Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador hat officially proclaimed to engage in a renewed socialist path during progressive governments in the first one and a half decades of the 21st century. This new variant of socialism, unfortunately, showed to have inherited some of the less desirable features of the 20th-century socialism, like a top-down and a rather authoritarian approach to transformation with a central role for the governing party, a centralization of state power overriding necessary checks and balances, and intolerance toward dissent which was often criminalized and judicially persecuted. This led to a climate of polarization which suffocated all the transformative energy which had grown in organized society during the plural anti-neoliberal struggles of the 90s and early 2000s and allowed for a silent return to free trade agreements and elite-friendly economic politics. Especially the expansion of extractivist and mega-project oriented modernization politics met increasing resistance from indigenous and peasant organizations, as well as affected communities. But also students, workers, and feminist organizations opposed them for manifold reasons. As some Ecuadorian organizations of this other, plural left express it in a recent open letter:

“The left is not a subject, a party, a movement, a government; It is a permanent human mobilization that reinvents and transforms society in search of the defense of life, affirming and expanding human dignity, justice and freedom without attacking other species and damaging the planet. (…) Ecuadorian progressivism was left when back in 2006, it expressed a social mobilization that sought to build a destiny different from that marked by the patriarchal and colonial capitalism prevailing in Ecuador and Latin America. However, at the moment that, contrary to expressing this social mobilization, it sabotaged it, suffocated it, persecuted it, silenced it, it ceased to be left. When the left is conservative, it ceases to be mobilization and social desire and becomes a party (Alianza País) with an ideological letterhead (Citizen Revolution) and a caudillo (Rafael Correa) that contains and destroys resistance and social mobilization, and stops history in its reinvention of more pleasant human worlds.”

Lately, former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, correista presidential candidate Andres Arauz and former Bolivian vice-president Alvaro García Linera played a role in the creation of a Progressive International, a plural global coordination space thriving toward systemic transformation, which unfortunately has taken sides in the ongoing harsh dispute about the definition of what is left in Latin America. Now, adding a new chapter to this same dispute on all sort of platforms, a wide range of arguments is deployed against Yaku Perez describing him as a coup-supporting, CIA-backed, imperialistic, oligarchic, and right-wing ecofascist or, alternatively, a greenwasher, if they do not dive into plainly racist arguments to delegitimize him. The campaign clearly triggers all the classical topoi which had helped the traditional left to construct a black and white, simplistic worldview during the Cold War. This strategy of aggressive polarization not only makes it impossible to engage seriously with Perez’s proposals for a future government, leaving Arauz with the monopoly of being “the leftist candidate” for the second electoral round by all means. It also avoids any critical engagement with or learning from the failure of progressive politics during its hegemony in recent Latin American history. But most importantly, it distracts from the really important themes that are at stake today, regarding new political strategies to face a multidimensional crisis (which includes political representation and liberal electoral democracy). It curtails any impulse to collectively co-create new societies in an open political space that allows trial and error and plural deliberation. The sterile you-are-either-with-me-or-against-me rhetoric closes the political space of creativity and spreads fear instead. It totally avoids engaging in a profound discussion about what meaningful leftist politics means today. The future we need will not be built on one candidate, anyway, regardless of his or her political orientation, but in a fertile interaction between strong social organizations and governments who learn to listen to their bases. In this sense, the open letter from Ecuador states:

The vote for Yaku Perez and the result of the Cuenca referendum shows that a significant share of Ecuadorian society shares these concerns. A new politics of the left both in Ecuador and Latin America must reconnect with the social effervescence of the 90s and early 2000s. It cannot be based on a triumphalist return of Socialism of the 21st Century but must acknowledge and learn from what has gone wrong during these years – a necessary auto-critical discussion that could also inspire many other transformative processes in the world. It must refocus on the rights of nature, which the policies of this ‘conservative progressive’ left have undermined when they were in government. Ecuador is one of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world. In times of massive species extinction, an economic policy course that relies on more mining and oil production could have incalculable consequences far beyond the small country. The pandemic has led to an expansion and acceleration of nature-destroying activities in a legal gray area throughout Latin America, as environmental controls have been largely suspended. At the same time, Covid-19 has made it very clear that the advance of capitalist overexploitation into fragile ecosystems harbors great dangers for humanity. In Cuenca, an entire urban population, and not just a rural community directly affected, has spoken out against mining. This popular decision paves the way to finally discuss the urgently needed fundamental change in economic policy, which puts life-sustaining aspects such as food sovereignty and clean water above the imperatives of the world market.

Miriam Lang is a Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Quito

La historia de la Modernidad tiene dos caras: por un lado, es una historia de revoluciones y luchas por los derechos. Pero, por orto lado, a la vez está plagada de violencias, de injusticias y de abusos. Muchos de los filósofos políticos ilustrados e incluso héroes de la Independencia eran esclavistas en su época. Las declaraciones de derechos -en linea liberal de derechos- excluían a mujeres y hombres no-blancos, pueblos indígenas y pueblos afros La misma noción de la Europa conquistadora potenció la masacre, el saqueo y la explotación de trabajo gratuito. En tanto que se fue expandiendo la voracidad por acumular valores abstractos, se fueron marginando otros horizontes civilizatorios en las comunidades humanas y también las relaciones de armonía con la Madre Tierra. Las Diversas relaciones de dominación subyugaron a las mujeres, a la Naturaleza, a los pueblos en cuyos territorios habían “recursos” acumulables.

por Alberto Acosta , Esperanza Martinez , Miriam Lang

Deudas diversas comenzaron a forjarse a lo largo del tiempo. Deudas que, de una u otra manera, reflejan estas estructuras de dominación. Las desigualdades e inequidades se plasmaron de formas múltiples. Todo ese entramado de poder desembocó en la apropiación y subordinación de trabajadores y trabajadoras, de campesinos y campesinas, en la separación entre trabajo considerado “productivo” y otro considerado “reproductivo”, normalmente no remunerado. Así se establecieron violentamente esferas de lo femenino y lo masculino, y una separación entre sociedades humanas y la Naturaleza en la que éstas están insertas. La idea de “raza” sirvió para justificar “científicamente” la explotación diferenciada al trabajo de personas negras, indígenas o de color, expandiendo así el poder imperial por el mundo y estableciendo formas de control de los cuerpos y subjetividades diferentes para cada grupo y género humano.

Hubo épocas en las cuales las mujeres, los indígenas y los negros no tenían alma… al menos para el discurso del poder. Desde entonces hasta hoy, patriarcado, clasismo y racismo han sido de las más arraigadas y eficaces formas de dominación social, material, psicológica y por cierto política. Y con esas formas de dominación se consolidó la expropiación de tierras y el saqueo de la Naturaleza, a costa del exterminio de millares de pueblos, con sus conocimientos, lenguas, culturas. La apropiación de trabajo esclavo, forzado, además del despojo de materiales que nutrieron la industrialización de las potencias coloniales, devino en una gran deuda histórica de los países centrales del sistema mundo capitalista con estas periferias desangradas; para mencionar un ejemplo, se estima que Gran Bretaña habría obtenido unos 36 millones de millones de libras esterlinas en todo el período colonial. Ese saqueo dio vida al capitalismo que, desde entonces, se sostiene con la explotación laboral, con la precarización del trabajo, con la invisibilización del trabajo del cuidado y sostenimiento de la vida, con la ocupación y destrucción de los bienes comunes, y con el desprecio de todo aquello que no pueda volverse mercancía.

En la actualidad, como resultado de tanta explotación y violencia, el planeta está en crisis, con desastres vinculados a un colapso climático cuyo origen no es natural. Lo que configura otra deuda eterna. No se trata de una simple deuda climática. La deuda ecológica encuentra sus orígenes en la expoliación colonial –la extracción de recursos minerales, las plantaciones o la tala masiva de los bosques naturales, por ejemplo–, se manifiesta tanto en el “intercambio ecológicamente desigual”, es decir los siglos de transferencia de bienes naturales del Sur al Norte global para alimentar los procesos industriales con “materia prima”, como en el “aprovechamiento gratuito del espacio ambiental” de los países empobrecidos por efecto del estilo de vida depredador de los países industrializados. Con el tiempo, las industrias más contaminantes, los monocultivos más invasivos y la basura tóxica se han trasladado a los países periféricos y dependientes. A lo anterior cabe añadir la biopiratería, impulsada por transnacionales que patentan en sus países de origen múltiples plantas y conocimientos indígenas: ya no solo se saquean metales preciosos, se saquea hasta el alma de los pueblos expresada en su conocimiento ancestral. En esta línea de reflexión también caben los daños provocados a la Naturaleza y a las comunidades sobre todo campesinas, con las semillas genéticamente modificadas, para citar un caso. Por eso bien podemos afirmar que no solo hay un intercambio comercial y financieramente desigual, como plantean las teorías de la dependencia, sino que también existe un intercambio ecológicamente desequilibrado y desequilibrador (incluso en términos de los flujos de materiales que transitan de unas partes del planeta a otras).

En suma, hay una deuda ecológica de la Humanidad al conjunto planeta, pero hay que destacar que son las élites los mayores causantes de esos destrozos. Como referencia cabe notar que solo el 10% más rico de la Humanidad causa la mitad de las emisiones de CO2 que están a raíz del calentamiento global; mientras que la mitad de los habitantes del planeta -los pobres- son responsables de un 10% de dicha emisiones.

En la actualidad, de lo que se trata es de recuperar las posibilidades de que la especie humana se mantenga en el planeta, ya no como una plaga o una pandemia, sino como parte de las relaciones de armonía y cuidado de la casa común y de todas las formas de vida que aquí nos acompañan. Eso implica proteger selvas, territorios, mares, pero además transformar nuestros modos de vida, nuestras relaciones y nuestras formas de producción y consumo.

Para mantener el modelo dominante, se desarrolló un sistema económico sostenido en la expansión del capital financiero, que no solo se difundió con el comercio, sino con inversiones y créditos. Bajo el mandato de buscar el “desarrollo”, en el mundo se expandió un modo de vida, con sus formas de producción y de consumo, que apunta a sostener a cualquier costo las ruedas de acumulación del capital. Un modo de vida irrepetible a escala planetaria, ya que solo se puede sostener para una minoría destruyendo los hábitats y modos de vida otros en los sures del planeta. Pese a ello, cada vez más, se quiere fortalecer la vorágine consumista empujándonos masivamente hacia crecientes endeudamientos tanto individuales como a nivel de gobiernos que generan dependencia, destruyen la autonomía personal y las soberanías, destrozan los lazos comunitarios y de convivencia humana y con el resto de formas de vida; las élites que construyen fortunas vertiginosas en base a este sistema quieren que les sigamos suministrando recursos naturales, sin importar la destrucción que provocan los extractivismos; quieren que seamos mercado para sus productos, sin permitir que encontremos nuestras propias formas de organización productiva.

Esas mismas élites hasta quieren que recibamos sus inversiones, sus créditos e incluso su “ayuda al desarrollo” para que sigamos condenados a suministrarles Naturaleza, trabajo e incluso capitales. Así quieren mantener su bienestar a costa de nuestras miserias. Y todo esto teniendo como potente palanca de dominación la entrega de financiamiento vía inversiones extranjeras y vía endeudamiento financiero; en total fluyen como inversiones, créditos y “ayuda al desarrollo” cerca de 2 millones de millones de dólares al año del Norte Global al Sur Global, pero regresan al norte en forma de diversas transferencias vinculadas a los flujos mencionados o por fuga de capital o evasión tributaria por unos 5 millones de millones (trillions en inglés).

De lo anterior se desprende que la deuda externa -financiera- es parte de la dominación económica y política de nuestras repúblicas. Una y otra vez la subordinación se consolida en el marco de la estructura internacional de control imperial, ahora con el FMI y el Banco Mundial, apuntalada con los mal llamados tratados de libre comercio (nunca libres ni solo comerciales). Este sistema consolida permanentemente nuestra posición como países suministradores de materias primas baratas y de mano de obra de bajo costo y hasta desechable. Y en el marco de estas relaciones económicas, como parte de un sistema de explotación comercial y financiero desequilibrado y desequilibrador, se perpetúan las dominaciones. Por ejemplo, para atender los compromisos impuestos por estas deudas financieras, se amplían y profundizan los extractivismos minero, petrolero, agroindustrial o pesquero, ahondando aún más la deuda ecológica de la que nuestros países son los acreedores; en forma paralela, para conseguir mejorar los niveles de competitividad, como reza el mensaje dominante, se flexibilizan más y más las relaciones laborales, precarizando sobre todo el trabajo femenino y agudizando la crisis de cuidados, lo que directa o indirectamente termina por ahondar tanto la deuda patriarcal así como otras deudas históricas. Y para pagar estas deudas financieras se sacrifican inversiones sociales vitales, configurándose así otra deuda eterna, la deuda social, reflejada en la pobreza y en las desigualdades.

Es preciso, entonces, impug­nar la deuda externa, la financiera, para establecer la justicia como referente básico, desde la doctrina de las deudas odiosas, usurarias y corruptas. Se requieren acciones para declarar injusta, ilegítima e impagable a la deuda existente, frenando simultáneamente los nuevos créditos que se están negociando para aumentar las inversiones en minería, petróleo, energía, agroindustria e incluso para activar modelos de privatización que cumplen con los condicionamientos y ajustes requeridos por la banca y los organismos internacionales. Tras todos estos procesos la corrupción manda. Por eso urge desmontar las tramas de corrupción inherentes a estas deudas. El coronavirus puso en la agenda internacional la urgencia de suspender los pagos de la deuda externa de los países del Sur, para atender la crisis sanitaria y alimentaria. Es decir, la deuda no se paga para poder salvar más vidas. Pero eso no es suficiente.

Esta realidad acumulada por siglos de explotación es un telón de fondo de la historia y de la realidad presente de nuestras sociedades, plagadas por DEUDAS ETERNAS: financieras, ecológicas, históricas, patriarcales, sociales. Estableciendo las correspondientes interconexiones entre estas deudas eternas, junto con la deuda financiera deben procesarse la deuda ecológica e incluso la deuda colonial, donde los países empobrecidos son los acreedores. Es el momento de poner todas las deudas sobre la mesa y redefinir a partir de ahí nuestro entendimiento de lo justo, en lugar de contentarnos con alivios temporales de mero carácter financiero.

El PACTO ECOSOCIAL DEL SUR propone abordar estas DEUDAS ETERNAS en su interconexión, en todas las discusiones sobre las transiciones para salir de la crisis actual, de otra manera, las inequidades se mantendrán y los problemas se acumularán… No basta hablar de la transición y la sustentabilidad, si se seguirá dependiendo del petróleo, la mineria o del trabajo precarizado de los sures del mundo, sosteniendo el patriarcado y la colonialidad. Proponemos discutir estas deudas en agendas post-pandemia, con claros horizontes postcapitalistas y postantropocéntricos, desde esquemas sustentados en la reciprocidad, el don y el intercambio, rescatando lo comunitario de la vida humana y no humana. Como se dice con claridad en el RAP que sintetiza esta lucha, es hora de gritar: deudas eternas… ¡basta!