PRESERVINGOUR WORLD
Winston Churchill summed-up the need rather well, in a speech to Britain’s Parliament in February, 1944: % is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter.” In 1946, speaking in the United States at a university in F&on, Missouri, England’s wartime leader made direct reference to the ungoverned dominance of technology and the possible consequences for mankind: “rhe dark ages may return; the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science . . . Time may be short.” Briefly put: the economic and trade policies of the industrial world have chiefly served to multiply and compound the problems, economic and environmental, of the developing world. We’ve already seen how increasing debt charges and falling commodity prices have forced Third World countries to abuse and over-exploit resources; they cut timber faster than it can be replaced, causing soil erosion and future flooding as well as wiping out a renewable resource base; the same too often applies, as we’ve seen, to farming and fishing. Every increase in interest rates, every drop in commodity prices, every new tariff, and every screw tightened in the growing structure of Western protectionism adds to the momentum of the Third World’s headlong spiral into poverty and environmental disaster. An example: Five nations in the Sahel region of Africa, (south of the Sahara Desert) - Burkino Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and Senegal, increased their annual cotton production 6.78 times in the period between 1962 and 1983 (from twenty-seven million tonnes to 154 million tonnes). While production was rising during these two decades, world cotton prices fell steadily; so even vastly increased production failed to let these sub-Saharan nations keep up with escalating international debt. At the same time, the Sahel region set a less salubrious record: In the early Sixties the Sahel- region as a whole imported 200,000 tonnes of cereals annually. In 1984 the region had to import 1.77 million tonnes of cereals - almost nine times the figure of twenty years earlier. Some of the increase can be laid at the door of larger population; much more blame is
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