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World Social Forum: A pause on the way
The World Social Forum met in Nairobi,
Kenya from 20 to 25 January. Beyond the opinion that each one
of us may have about its achievements, what we would like to highlight
is not so much what was said or what was done there but its message
that “another world is possible.” .
This message implicitly means that the
present world is no longer possible. In this world, increasingly
dominated by large corporations, social and environmental problems
are aggravated year after year. In spite of the incessant intervention
of so-called solutions by those seeking desperately to keep it
alive, the truth is that in most cases, the remedy is worse than
the illness itself. Let us look at some examples of these so-called
“solutions” in WRM’s scope of action:
- To face the loss of biodiversity,
the main “solution” is the establishment of protected areas, implying
among other things eviction of the communities who live in them
- To face deforestation, “solutions”
are added, such as protected areas, monoculture tree plantations
and certification of plantations and forests
- To face climate change, some of the
“solutions” are carbon sinks (tree plantations) and biofuels (oil
palm, transgenic soybean and maize, sugarcane).
Each one of these “solutions” implies
a series of serious negative social and environmental impacts
that we have explained in numerous articles in the WRM Bulletin.
Their true value is zero and they only serve to give the deceitful
impression that everything can be solved without resorting to
the sweeping changes urgently required. Among other things, they
enable the following:
- To continue with deforestation so
that large companies (timber, mining, oil, hydroelectric, shrimp)
can carry on making profits with the excuse that there are protected
areas to maintain biodiversity, that plantations lessen the pressure
on forests (and that they are certified), that hydroelectric dams
do not cause greenhouse effect gas emissions, etcetera.
- To continue promoting agricultural
and tree monoculture plantations and their accompanying package
of agrochemicals and transgenic plants so that the large seed,
chemical, biotechnological and pulp companies can carry on making
profits under the false pretence that they are attempting to mitigate
hunger in the world or substitute oil by biofuels or produce the
paper the world needs.
- To continue destroying the climate
with the continuous burning of fossil fuels allowing oil companies
to carry on making their profit, but also to enable other large
companies (palm oil, sugar, biotechnology, etc.) to enter the
business.
- To continue destroying the base for
subsistence of millions of peasants and indigenous people through
appropriation of land, water and forests by the large companies
(in the water, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, pulp business, etc.).
In spite of its apparent strength, that
world has already shown itself to be impossible and that it destroys
the very foundations of the world we all live in.
To face this, the message of the Forum
is “another world is possible.” What kind of world? A world that
is socially supportive and environmentally respectful. But how
would it be? We don’t have an answer but we do have the conviction
that it is possible. How do we reach this? Perhaps the words of
the writer Eduardo Galeano will serve to make us think:
“Utopia is on the horizon. I move two
steps closer, it moves two steps further away. I walk another
ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much
as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia?
The point is this: to keep walking”
Along this walk, the World Social Forum
is just a pause on the way, where an enormous diversity of walkers
stops to exchange ideas among themselves. What matters is not
what the Forum does or what the Forum can do, but that the walkers
start finding ways to reach that “other possible world.”
