Madrid Update No. 6

At the final day of the World Forum on Migration being held in Madrid, I attended an interesting panel titled ¨The Challenge of external debt and the migratory process.¨ The panel presented a stunning outline of the relationship between foreign debt and migration. Foreign debt, especially for southern nations in Latin America and Africa, reduces the amount of capital that those countries have for their own economic development. Debt also affects the prices of goods in those countries. The population gets poorer. The country cannot tax at a high rate, and that also means less money for the country for development. Because of the debt, there is a scarcity of financing available; lower income means less consumption, which means less economic activity, and fewer jobs credited. This is a moral problem as well as an economic problem. Members of poor families do not have the possible to ascend in class or profession and stay poor. The elites of the countries have access to elite institutions. The poor thus have less opportunity and access to be heard.

Poor with debt do not have a voice or influence to change the major institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. The developed countries who are the creditors are the ones with the influence. The poor countries end up needing more and more credit to survive. They simply don´t have the basic internal structures or tax structure to fund the debt, and end up paying the debt service. An example of the relation with migration is Ecuador. Because of debt, 8 to 10% of Ecuadorans had to leave the country. After a crisis in Argentina in 2001, there was a similar experience.

One speaker from Africa argued that the creditor nations don´t leave the debtor nations with enough to live on. The poor countries are placed in the position of having to essentially sell their resources in order to get more credit. There is real frustration among the people of African nations. Much of the money that went to African countries in the past was placed in the hands of governors-leaders who were corrupt. This made things worse, as the money was not spent on infrastructure. The products of creditor nations like France and the U.S. end up getting subsidized. In Ghana in the 1980´s, chicken farmers lost out, as frozen food started being offered at cheaper rates and they couldn´t compete (a later speaker explained that partly this was like countries in Europe that consume legs and wings and package and send the rest of the chickens to Africa for sale). The speaker really thinks that the West owes Africa (rather than the other way around) going back to the slavery era. Under the current system, the weak countries are getting weaker. He was frustrated that some in the West label Africans as violent. But Africans are not producing weapons! Who is selling them these weapons?

Another speaker was an ecologist from Spain. The way the debt and the current global economy works, there are huge environmental and sociological effects that affect migration. Agriculture is a big example of that. He says they each consumer in Spain uses a large percentage of materials in their daily life from out of the county. We end up extracting natural resources from the southern hemisphere and produce products that are used in the north. Consider soy. This is from Latin America like Brazil. Soy is used in all sorts of products (check your product labels, he urged), and is also used to feed animals and added to things like cheese and other products. Spain itself is the 5th largest consumer of soy (I´m afraid to ask where the U.S. falls!). We end up pluting rivers and affecting forests and small agricultural systems. There are farmers who are trying to express opposition, but they have been silenced and oppressed by their governments. Consider celluloid. Where does the paper we use come from? Our use is transforming natural landscapes negatively. Chlorodioxide is used for processing. Celluloid is mainly produced in Latin America. Europe uses 25% of what is produced. Yet Spain is trying to build another plant in Uruguay that will pollute water and air and will affect the tourism industry in Uruguay. Climate change produced by our consumption of products that affect the ozone layer (think global warning) will cause 130 million people to migrate in the next generation. The climate change affects the ability of people in the south to produce what they were able to in the past. The 2005 Kyoto accords attempt to address this, but not every country is cooperating (e.g., the U.S.!). We use too many prodcuts that contain materials from far away that we don´t need. We must look at new policies to change our current course of action.

bh