Taking the issue Due North

The US government has just given
The Canadians a well-deserved kick
on their pants. It has forced Canada not
just to cut subsidies to its domestic lumber industry but also accept effective
quotas on lumber shipments to the US.
The US argued that the Canadian lumber
industry is unfairly subsidised, which
has resulted in a steady increase of
Canadian lumber in the American
domestic market - from a 27 per cent
share in 1991 to a record 36 per cent in
1995. As a result, US lumber mills have
cut thousands of jobs, and lumber
prices have dropped by more than one-third since early 1994.

The Canadian colonisers, who
found-vast tracts of forests, have been
merrily plundering and pillaging their
natural heritage. Different Canadian
states have set their own tree-cutting
fees and tend to give away their forests
at well below market prices - something that we did too with our forests, to
feed our paper industry. Now the
Canadian provinces have been forced to
agree to not just increase tree-cutting
fees, but if these still do not sufficiently
shrink their lumber exports, they will
take back-up measures like export taxes
and quotas.

The news gave me a perverse pleasure because it was precisely the same
Canadians who had ruined India's massive experiment with farm forests in the
mid-'80s. Indian foresters and paper
manufacturers had somehow convinced
the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi,
that if he permitted reduced customs
duties on foreign pulp imports, it would
save India's forests. These great visionary entrepreneurs, who are today crying
for wood, had then found it cheaper,
and hence more expedient, to import
pulp from Canada rather than buy
wood from Indian farmers and pulp it
domestically.

Seeing their market crash - no
Indian farmer will grow wood unless it
fetches a price equivalent to, or better
than, the competing crop - the farmers
plucked out millions of plants from
their farms. The Canadians had, thus,
cook destroyed what was slowly
becoming a strategy for internal mobilisation of wood resources and improved
environmental regeneration in India.

Undoubtedly, there are problems
with India's farm forestry. It was mainly
reaching out to big farmers, who were
using quality agricultural lands for
planting trees like eucalyptus. The ideal
solution would have been to develop
policies so that poorer farmers, who
owned poor-quality lands, could have
grown multi-purpose tree species. It was
a lesson that India would have slowly
learnt, and had, indeed, started learning. In the lateritic tracts of West
Bengal, many patta-holders (land deed
holders) could not grow anything on
their state-gifted lands, which were so
poor that the owners largely remained
migrant labourers. They suddenly
found that they could now grow
trees and earn a good price too. Farm
forestry was a source for income they
had never seen before. But this could
not continue unless the wood market
existed.

Canadians do not have problems of
competing crops, nor of competing uses
for their lumber. As long as they can cut
the trees cheaply enough, they can hold
the market to, ransom. Canadian NGOs
have often disparagingly called their
country the 'Brazil of the North', which,
I personally think, is most unfortunate.
Brazil at least has problems of poverty
and development associated with its
Amazonian crisis, whereas the
Canadian forestry pillage is nothing
more than just that, and exclusively for
cheap wealth.

And strangely, something I have
never really understood, it was Canada
that fought for a forest convention at
the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Till the
end of the conference, everyone was
guessing what this convention was all
about. Just what is it that the Canadian
government then wanted, and still
wants, in the UN from, a forest
convention remains a mystery - or
should I say, conspiracy? Is it trying to
push a convention that will protect
forests, or its own economic interest in
forestry?

But the US-Canada tussle does show
how, in a globalised economy, if one
country undervalues its environment, it
can send massive economic reverberations across the globe. The need for
building in ecological costs into internationally traded commodities remains
imperative. However, the US government itself is not trying to make any
serious point about trade and environment issues in this tussle.. This is election year, and the Clinton administration - despite all its past rhetoric on
free trade - is desperately trying to
assure its own workers and industry that
it cares for them.

The Wall Street Journal recently
reported how the American government is trying to subvert Mexican
exports by denying Mexican trucks
access to US roads. The point being
made is that Mexican trucks are unsafe
for US roads. The Washington Post
recently even carried an advertisement
protesting a bill in the Congress which
protects Florida tomato growers, who
gas the tomatoes to ripen them, from
vine-ripened Mexican tomatoes that are
imported. This the bill would do by
changing the standards in the US law.
The Republican-dominated Congress
does not care a bit about what this will
do to US commitments in NAFTA or WTO.

I guess all this simply teaches us that
trade is still an issue that has more to do
with politics than rationality. After all,
that is exactly what the East India
Company had taught US.