ANOTHER VOICE
What the rest of the world seems to have forgotten
AUBERON WAUGH
0 ne of the more encouraging develop- ments of the last two weeks has been the almost universal derision which has greeted the Earth Summit in Rio. Whenever I have seen the event reported — although it is true that I have not looked at the Guardian or the Independent, both of which might have taken it seriously — it has been given the importance of a Teddy Bears' Picnic party on a children's television programme.
Few have tried very hard to articulate the reasons for this general scepticism, although one or two have mentioned doubts about global warming, which has not yet started to happen, although the offi- cial UN estimate is now that, if nothing is done, global mean temperature is 'likely' to rise by 'about' one degree Centigrade by 2025, when I shall be 85 and in no position to enjoy it, and by three degrees by the end of the next century, by which time we will all be dead several times over.
Of course the UN would say that, wouldn't it? Nobody in Rio, I am prepared to bet, has yet pointed out that carbon dioxide is produced by vegetation more than it is produced by industrial activity, and that the worst offenders by far are these accursed tropical rain-forests. Nor have I seen anyone remark that ozone, far from being a rare natural element like plat- inum, is produced by the action of the sun on the oxygen in our atmosphere and so replaces itself whenever it suffers deple- tion.
Committed exorbitants like mad, sad Christopher Booker feel that the Earth Summit is not doing enough to save the planet — it should jolly well be passing laws with more teeth in them et cetera — but those of more sceptical turn of mind would probably explain the general dissatisfaction by a dawning awareness that its main signif- icance may be in the evidence it affords that frenzied over-government is a world problem, not one confined to Britain, or the Common Market, the United States of America or the formerly socialist states of the Warsaw Pact. One would like to think that 'developing' nations approach the whole jamboree in a spirit of genial cyni- cism, anxious to grab whatever money is available for the vague promise of preserv- ing a monkey or two. But one should never underestimate the attraction (to those afflicted with the political disease) of issu- ing fatuous regulations, telling people what they may eat and how they must eat it. The idea of a world conference of these bossy maniacs was obviously irresistible to them. In the good old days of Common- wealth Conferences, at least one of the heads of state attending generally found himself the victim of a coup in his absence. It occurs to me that it would be a wonderful idea if the whole world could be persuaded to repudiate its leaders, leaving them squabbling among themselves about biodi- versity and birth control in Rio while the rest of us got on with our own business, whether skinning and eating monkeys or devising new costumes for women priests.
Such self-indulgent fantasies, however, should not blind us to the fact that if there is any element of truth in all the rubbish talked by Booker, everybody is approaching it from the wrong end. The problem is not one of over-population so much as of mass prosperity. There are already too many people with too much money. If everybody was as rich as the Americans, the planet would indeed be uninhabitable. The solu- tion is not to give money to the developing nations in exchange for a promise that they will lay off their monkeys, their parrots and their rain-forests. The solution is to ban all capital investment in the Third World.
Of course nobody is capable of urging such a course. It is not as if there is much money to be made in the Third World goodness 'knows how many thousands of millions of pounds' debt our own Big Five banks alone have written off in the last ten years — but the idea that investment in the Third World is somehow virtuous has stuck. I should guess it will be ineradicable for another ten years, by which time we will be in a position to see that such investment, far from being virtuous, was very wicked indeed. The Third World should be left to cope with its own problems of monkeys, parrots and rain-forests as best it can.
Only one country seems to have had the clear-mindedness to see through all this Bookerish rubbish, and that is the United States of America. Although one some- 'We should have a referendum on the Treaty of Versailles.' times despairs of the American people for the extreme stupidity of their so-called intellectuals, the ineptitude of their so- called artists and the gross ignorance of the entire culture, one must also admit that there is a commonsense in that same cul- ture which reflects itself in the country's conduct of its affairs. Whether it was Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War sin- gle-handed, or whether he was helped a bit by the State Department and Pentagon tra- ditions which had been all but repudiated in the disastrous Jimmy Carter episode, commonsense won through in the end.
So might it yet. The chief problem facing the world at the moment has nothing to do with whales, or ozone, or the survival of the Booker bird. It is what on earth is going to happen to the former Soviet Union. We cannot happily leave it to its own devices. The 12 new republics, in a state of collec- tive nervous breakdown, share 30,000 nuclear weapons between them, attached to every sort of conveyance.
Mr Raymond Seitz, the American ambassador in London, addressed himself to these problems in a speech to the Ameri- can Chamber of Commerce in Birmingham some weeks ago. It reads very grimly indeed. The trouble these republics are in can scarcely be exaggerated. Last year the Russian gross domestic product declined by 17 per cent. Over three years, the GDP of the former Soviet Union will have declined by almost half. Inflation is running at 600 per cent, and as much as a third of the workforce will probably end up unem- ployed, in a country which traditionally denied the existence of unemployment and therefore has no safety net:
As stark as these figures are, however, they fail to capture the depth of the dereliction. Huge, technologically clumsy enterprises continue mindlessly to devour State subsidies and produce inferior goods nobody needs or wants... Roughly one third of the natural gas which passes through Soviet pipelines leaks out, and one out of 10 barrels of oil is spilled.
Any possibility of a happy ending to all this depends on pious hope, no more: ancient, antagonistic nationalisms will be forgotten; everybody will decide to pull together, accepting hardship.
There are a few hopeful signs, but not many. Only the United States seems pre- pared to address itself to these mammoth questions, while the rest of the world squabbles and strikes attitudes in Rio.
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