B. Mezgebu
28 November 2007
column
Why are so many people, especially the business bunch everywhere, so excited about present day China? Mainly because it is home to one billion-plus people who are supposedly waiting to snap up every conceivable goody with a briskly growing economy to give them the buying power to do so.
There are, of course, millions of Chinese who will be left behind, remain poor far into the future, and would be quite delighted if they can satisfy their daily basic needs, leave alone conspicuous consumption. The marketing advertisements, however, continue to sweet-talk everyone to buy and spend more and more, even if it means many of the things advertised are beyond their means. In China especially, foreign business firms keep jostling to have a toe on the beachhead.
How to reconcile then the call to splurge not only in China but in every banana republic worth its national anthem, with the several research findings that are just out. A journal wrote on it thus: "It is a pity we have only one planet to live on. The latest planetary health assessment shows we need 1.4 Earths to sustain the average lifestyle." If we don't slow down, the report warns, "Humanity is at risk." How much land does a person need? That depends on many things including on how low your threshold is to getting used to a taste of dystopia. On TV footage several decades back, watching so many people walking about their daily business on Asian streets; I was given to shaking my head and say "how do they avoid fist fights".
These days I confront it here in the streets of Addis on daily basis and I ca navigate my way perfectly. It is said that some people feel claustrophobic even in Alaska. Such people would probably freak out in Merkato.
The UN Environmental Programme released its fourth Global Environment Outlook. The crux of the finding was that humanity is in debt. On October 6 of this year, all of the 6 billion inhabitants of our Planet went into ecological debt. The calculation may not have been that simple or straightforward, but the conclusion was unequivocal: In just one year, people consumed more than the planet can regenerate in one year. The human ecological footprint is 21.9 hectares per person on average; the Earth's biological capacity is just 15.7 hectares per person.
Take grazing areas in Ethiopia. This offers an objective lesson in unsustainability. There are no private gazing lands anywhere in the country here as we all know. This means all grazing lands are communal. And that in turn means they are free, and every wizened cow, therefore, which should have been butchered a long time ago, eke out their daily feed. Where there should have been 10 cows, there are bound to be 100, a disaster in the making. Well, actually a disaster that has in fact taken place decades ago. Grasslands in the highlands are not just degraded. They are no more. Well almost.
One other report (Ecological Economics), finds the only country to have sustainably lived the year was Cuba. Great news as it stands; but Cuba is not your ordinary Latin American country. As one of the very few remaining ramparts of socialism, it has been going back to the lowest level of energy consumption after its biggest ally, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now horse drawn carriages are making a comeback on the streets.
Are Ethiopians burning too much oil? I have no clue, but what can be said with certainty is that we will be burning more oil, not less, as the years role on. In any case, Ethiopia's ecological indebtedness lies somewhere.
It has to do with the land and how people have been misusing their resources of the land: our soils, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, wildlife habitats and our biodiversity. Going back to the issue of grazing lands mentioned above, their biological capacity was so overwhelmed by too many animals per a unit of land that most collapsed, and others were obliterated. The human footprint was too overpowering in this case. Generally, it is not inflated to say that we are continuing to live on overdraft.
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