Bill Mollison, who is the originator of permaculture – an integrated
approach to land use, economics and empowerment – advises suburban dwellers
to dig up their roses to make space for food crops and to put their lawns
on their roofs if they want effective insulation. Seabrook quotes Mollison:
‘People thought I was talking about gardens – few realised we were selling
the softest form of total revolution. Self-reliance is seditious.’ Leonard
Kohr’s remark that ‘small is glorious’ was, he says, conceived in a spirit
of levity in a joke over breakfast in 1939. Kohr became convinced of his
own argument that smallness is an essential property of nature: things grow
until they reach the dimensions that serve their function. Only human beings
believe that if a small thing is good, then a larger one will be better,
Kohr says. His idea was popularised by his friend, the British economist
Fritz (E. F) Schumacher, in his book, Small is Beautiful (1973).

Mollison and Kohr are two of the 40 individuals and organisations that
received the Right Livelihood Award during its first decade and whose ideas
form the basis of Jeremy Seabrook’s Pioneers of Change. This ‘Not-the-Nobel-Prize’
prize came about in the late 1970s, after Jakob von Uexkull tried to persuade
the Nobel foundation to introduce an award for the environment. Von Uexkull
sold his stamp collection to fund the foundation. Since its first awards
were given in 1980, the Right Livelihood Foundation has recognised outstanding
work in peace, sustainable development, environmental integrity, social
justice and human rights. In Pioneers of Change, Seabrook guides us through
this hall of fame.

The journey is exciting, not least because this hall of fame is unique.
Seabrook draws together the varied work of the laureates, taken mostly from
personal interviews with them, and shows their common origins in disillusionment
with the way the world works, its materialism, and the spiritual blindness
that follows.

Among other prizewinners is Frances Moore Lappe who has continued the
iconoclastic trend she set in 1977 when she co-authored Food First: Beyond
the Myth of Scarcity, by turning her attention to the myth of democracy.
Lappe has set up the Institute for the Arts of Democracy, aimed at revitalising
US democratic values because, she believes, the world’s problems derive
from the absence of genuine participation by citizens. Seabrook adds: ‘The
problem in the US and Europe is somewhat different. There, the danger is
that formal democratic institutions become ossified, and that people lose
faith in them, because the real power moves elsewhere – to autonomous and
apparently unbiddable economic forces. This makes people cynical and fatalistic,
aware of their own impotence, which is deeply damaging to a system whose
supreme virtue is supposed to be that it empowers people. It serves little
purpose to get issues onto political agendas, if people no longer believe
in politics.

Omar Sattaur is based in Nepal.

Perhaps it was simply knee-jerk guilt but it always seemed wrong, somehow,
to blame South America for its deforestation and then dismiss it as South
America’s problem. As it turned out, moral considerations became less important
as we in the North were made to realise that our own interests were at stake.
Destroying rainforests increases greenhouse gases, which do not observe
geographical boundaries. The warming of the Earth and the consequent climatic
changes affect us all. Susan George’s book explores the hidden links between
Third World peasants and First World taxpayers.

George is careful, throughout her book, to avoid making simplistic cause-and-effect
relationships between Third World debt and its ‘boomerang’ impact on creditor
nations. Rather, she and her co researchers ‘stress feedbacks more than
linear connections and tend to see debt and its multiple consequences as
mutually reinforcing’.

The book shows how the ‘debt boomerang’ on its return trip contributes
to disturbing global climate and reducing biodiversity, flooding Northern
markets with cocaine, extorting money from you and me to subsidise commercial
banks, robbing Northern industry and agriculture of hundreds of thousands
of jobs, encouraging immigration to the North and contributing to global
instability.

From the onset of the debt crisis in 1982, until 1990, debtor countries
paid creditors in the North $6500 million per month in interest alone.
Yet in 1991 those countries were 61 per cent more indebted than they were
in 1982. The crisis has been debilitating to the poorest people in debtor
countries and this book attempts to show how their strategies for coping
directly or indirectly affect us in the North.

Heavy borrowing in the 1970s financed huge, ecologically damaging projects
in the South such as large dams and nuclear power plants. Debtor countries
found themselves cashing in their environmental resources to foot the repayment
bills. Policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund, whose loans
most nations seek as a last resort, are designed to accumulate foreign exchange
with which to repay debt. Only when repayments are substantially met is
the country allowed to pursue other goals. Debtors attempt to fulfil their
obligations to the IMF by exporting natural resources such as minerals,
timber, meat, fish, tropical crops and so on. Research presented in the
book shows clear correlations between the degree of indebtedness and deforestation.

Peru’s military leaders amassed enormous debts during the 1960s and
1970s such that, by 1973, debt servicing accounted for more than 20 per
cent of the country’s export earnings. In 1978 Peru had no choice but to
beg from the IMF, yet its debt continued to increase through the early 1980s.
Alan Garcia, who won the presidency in 1985, inherited a debt burden of
US $16 billion. He proposed to limit debt service payments to 10 per cent
of export earnings and refused to pay the IMF the arrears it asked for.
Peru became ineligible for further loans from IMF, World Bank and commercial
banks. A miners’ strike in 1988, a private sector starved of credit, and
inflation amounting to 2772 per cent by 1989, led to massive emigration,
a strategy that many citizens of debt-ridden Third World countries have
reluctantly adopted and which the book deals with in a separate chapter.
Two-thirds of the population were unemployed or under employed and, as in
Bolivia, the cocaine industry provided work for the desperate.

The book reveals how commercial banks that ostensibly lost money on
bad loans to Third World governments in reality lost very little because,
since 1982, Northern taxpayers have contributed between $44 and $50 billion
in tax relief on bank provisions and ‘losses’. Disguised subsidies from
the public sector to private banks amounted to some $33 billion.

The stringent policies ‘enforced’ by the IMF have left Third World countries
too poor to import Northern goods. In September 1986, the US Congress Joint
Economic Committee stated that ‘by sacrificing their sales and jobs so that
debtor nations can fully meet all interest pavements, US exporters and
workers have been subsidising the bad lending policies of US and other money
centre banks. US workers and exporters are also bailing out European and
Japanese banks’.

The final chapter on conflict and war presents an interesting analysis
of the origins of the Gulf War and a convincing account of how debt and
debt forgiveness affected Iraqi and Egyptian moves during the conflict.
George ends with some observations that are often forgotten: Third World
debt has been largely or entirely repaid; those who borrowed were rarely
elected by their peoples (who now suffer the terrible consequences); those
who loaned were irresponsible or intent on making debtors subservient to
their interests and, finally, there are no checks on international funding
agencies. If the World Bank or IMF get it wrong, millions suffer but the
institutions’ policies are beyond political accountability.

Omar Sattaur is based in Khatmandu, Nepal.

Ferns speak of prehistoric times. They are among the oldest of the Earth’s
plants, their fossils dating back nearly 400 million years. In that time
some 1200 species have evolved into an enormous range of shapes and sizes
from the delicate maidenhair ferns to the robust tree ferns and the bizarre
hard ferns that look like neither tree nor fern.

On the right is a frond of Cnemidaria horrida, a tree fern of the American
tropics, in the bud stage of development, tightly coiled to form a crosier.
The black edging of the unfurled, mature fronds beneath the crosier are
groups of ‘seeds’, called sporangia. Ferns have fed, clothed, sheltered
and healed us as well as adding to the beauty of our environment. The male
fern, as Dryopteris filix-mas is more commonly known, has been used since
the 2nd century to rid the gut of intestinal worms. It has doubled as a
love potion, and its oil was the original base of the Fougere perfumes.
The crosiers, once known as St John’s Hands, were said to protect against
sorcery or evil eye.

Today, people in Papua New Guinea use tree ferns to build their houses,
North Americans eat the crosiers of Matteuccia struthiopteris and practitioners
in many parts of the world praise ferns for their medicinal value.

A World of Ferns commemorates a century of British pteridomania and
the first centenary of the British Pteridological Society. The beautiful
pictures that fill this book were donated by members and friends of the
society, and pay tribute to their fascination with the fern’s amazing diversity
of form.

Thankfully, there were four Cox’s Orange Pippins in the kitchen or it
would have been difficult to get through the evening. Reading The Apple
Source Book when the fruit bowl was empty would have been unbearable, for
it is a small but mouthwatering collection of recipes by leading cooks,
food writers, gardeners and orchardists in celebration of the apple.

Britons have grown 6000 varieties of apple since the Romans brought
them in at the conquest. Today it is difficult to find more than nine varieties
in the shops. Yet apples are varied and wonderful, with textures and flavours
that are as much a result of the landscape they help to fashion as the lines
they were bred from. As Joan Morgan points out in her introduction, there
is an apple for all seasons. The recipes bear her out.

Gail Duff concocts an autumn salad of celery, bacon, Cheshire cheese,
walnuts, watercress, and Egremont russet apples whose flesh, she writes,
is ‘smooth and creamy, with a nutty quality and their skins the colour of
autumn leaves’.

George and Barbara Morris, who have made a study of the apples that
survive in Yorkshire, choose the cockpit – ‘sharp tasting and keeping its
shape well in a pie’ – for their leek and cockpit quiche. And Sophie Grig-son
suggests the Kidd’s orange red for her Creme Normande, ‘a marvellously rich
and devastating pudding’ in which Calvados is reunited with chopped apple
and baked. But what could I make with four common Cox’s?

Elizabeth David came to the rescue with pommes au beurre for which she
always uses Cox’s Orange Pippins. David admits to having learnt two valuable
lessons from the French about cooked apple dishes. The first is to choose
hard, sweet apples instead of the sour cooking variety commonly used in
English apple dishes. She gives no further explanation, but one might be
derived from Morgan’s essay on apple varieties at the front of the book.

The more acidic the apple is, the more easily it will cook and form
a puree, Morgan writes. Less sharp apples break down less readily so slices
retain their shape. Perfect for pommes au beurre. David’s second lesson
from the French was that apples should be cooked in butter, not water, if
they are to be eaten hot. ‘The scent of apples cooking in butter is alone
more than worth the small extra expense . . . Serve hot; and I doubt if
many people will find cream necessary. The delicate butter taste is enough.’
As indeed it was.

Lukas Brader, chairman of the centres’ subcommittee on intellectual
property rights, says that patents could protect Third World genes from
misappropriation by industry. ‘Patents, were they to be established in the
IARCs, would never be to make money for individual centres. Any income would
be channelled back to Third World countries, for example, via the UN International
Fund for Plant Genetic Resources’, Brader says.

Patents could also help IARC researchers to bargain with industry for
transfer of technology. At present IARC scientists visiting private laboratories
stand to lose rights over any part of their work that turns out to have
commercial significance.

The arguments have been roundly criticised by Genetic Resources Action
International (GRAIN), a nongovernmental organisation campaigning on behalf
of Third World farmers. GRAIN holds that patents would hamper free exchange
of genetic resources, which are essential for rapid progress in plant breeding.

The IARCs are intergovernmental organisations set up to benefit countries
of the South. They have long been criticised for their technological approach
to solving the problems of the poor, as in the green revolution. Crop varieties
that produced higher yields benefited not poor farmers but those wealthy
enough to afford the fertilisers, pesticides and machinery that the higher
yields depended on. GRAIN argues that by jumping on the biotechnology bandwagon
the IARCs move further away from the needs of their beneficiaries.

The centres are dominated by Northern researchers and are under Northern
control. Who owns the genes in their banks is still unclear. These worries
threaten the already delicate relationship that some IARCs have with the
governments of some countries. Any move towards patenting is seen as a move
that strengthens the influence of the North over organisations whose only
concern should be how best to serve the interests of the South. ‘It will
create a lot more distrust than cooperation’, says Renee Vellve of GRAIN.

Brader shares some of GRAIN’s concerns and admits that the briefing
paper raises important questions. ‘The status of (IARC) gene banks is different
in different countries’, he says. ‘It is perhaps still a little too fluid,
I think.’

In this book Jacques Gaillard makes only the vaguest attempt to match
his text to the promise of its title, Scientists in the Third World. The
book’s sleeve asks intriguing questions: what role has science in poor countries?
How can they catch up with rich countries without spending unacceptably
large chunks of their national budgets on training and research? How important
are indigenous scientific communities? But attempts at answers are to be
found in the preface and concluding chapter rather than in the bulk of the
book.

I could not help wondering why Gaillard did not stop at the preface.
He has analysed 489 responses to questionnaires completed by scientists
in Third World countries who had applied for a research grant from the International
Foundation for Science. More than 60 per cent of them had a PhD or equivalent,
and most earned their doctorates in developed countries.

It is difficult to see how the responses of that select group of individuals
led to the rather general recommendations hinted at in the preface and outlined
in the last chapter. Nonetheless, Gaillard drags the reader through a tedious
collection of statistics to arrive at a concluding chapter whose only surprise
is just how unremarkable its findings are. There the reader learns that
developing science takes time, political commitment and coordination between
donor countries and indigenous scientific organisations. The only reprieve
is the author’s occasional slip into a quagmire or blind alley as he struggles
to avoid appearing racist or patronising, while interpreting the barrage
of facts and figures that he has thrown out.

For example, Gaillard says his respondents seem to have adopted a ‘Western
standard’ in that two-thirds of his sample have, at most, two children.
He writes: ‘The marriage strategy (late marriage, strong endogamy, Malthusian
behaviour) seems to characterise a very rational approach to reproduction
for this emerging intellectual class. Under the influence of the Western
model, which presupposes that small families are more mobile and get along
better socially than large families, the scientists produce as many children
as they think they can establish at a level they would be satisfied to occupy
³Ù³ó±ð³¾²õ±ð±ô±¹±ð²õ.’

Gaillard could find no link between the length of time spent abroad
and the adoption of the ‘Western model’. So, if they didn’t mimic their
Western peers how did they come to have so few children? The answer? ‘Adopting
the Western model seemed to stem less often from acculturation caused by
an extended stay in the West than from the scientist’s profession.’ But
there is no control group of, for example, arts graduates. He ends his discussion
with the rather opaque sentence: ‘Constraints linked to aggregated effects
of intellectual advancement (time) are probably the most decisive.’

When Gaillard talks of the lack of universities in the developing countries
offering PhDs at the time of independence he is, of course, referring to
establishments such as the University of Cairo, founded in 1908 rather than,
say, al-Azhar University, also in Cairo but founded in 970. Models of learning
different from those adopted in the Western world appear to be irrelevant
to the author.

There are hints of some of the causes for dependence on the North. Apart
from intellectual stimulation and usefulness to society, respondents reported
choosing research topics according to what the Western journals were publishing
and even according to the availability of equipment. Could the North adapt
itself to make science truly international or should the South contrive
to establish an alternative science forum? But such information is left
unprocessed. The questions this book asks are important, but they
deserve more serious treatment.

The report draws on three years of research in 18 developing countries
by Michael Philips of the Washington-based International Institute for Energy
Conservation. It concludes that development strategies that incorporate
schemes for conserving energy would provide better, cheaper and cleaner
energy services for billions of people.

Philips stressed that if the bank promoted energy efficiency in industry,
transport and power stations and among domestic users, developing countries
could save more than £1.2 trillion over the next 40 years. His report
points to American investment in energy conservation which the US government
claims saves £100 billion a year, or 14 million barrels of oil a day.
Philips blames the bank’s lack of expertise in energy efficiency. ‘Bank
staff can learn but they don’t have direct experience of designing and running
energy efficiency programmes.’

Gloria Davis, director of the bank’s environment department for Asia,
says the bank spends too little on schemes to conserve energy. But she points
out the bank’s difficulty in funding small projects. ‘The kind of activity
that needs to be done for end-use energy efficiency tends to be small-scale
technical assistance. Borrowing countries have come to the bank for large
capital investments.’

The bank’s own progress report on its environment department, created
in 1987 after prolonged criticism of its environmental record, fared little
better among environmentalists. Mohammed el-Ashry, the department’s newly
appointed director, says that from this month the bank would be assessing
the environmental impact of all its projects. But some projects slip through
with no environmental impact study at all, says Maria Elena Hurtado, director
of a British pressure group, the World Development Movement. ‘Worse still,
the combined impact of related projects may have an environmental impact
that is missed, simply because the projects are treated separately,’ she
says.

El-Ashry says he hopes to build up the ‘intellectual capability and
firepower’ of his department over the next few months.

The bank’s progress report highlights the serious forestry problems
in Third World countries. In Nigeria, for example, it says that soil erosion
and degradation, water contamination, and deforestation are the key environmental
problems. ‘If nothing is done to stem the damage, long-term losses could
reach some $5 billion a year.’

But environmentalists blame poorly designed bank projects for contributing
to the problems in the first place. ‘The bank’s forestry activities have
been held in abeyance pending a full review of its policy. We are watching
very carefully to see just how the new policy will be implemented,’ said
Francis Sullivan, WWF.

The World Bank chose Thailand as its host this year because it regards
the country as a good example of how the bank’s policies can lead to healthy
economic growth. Environmentalists are less convinced and point to the country’s
disastrous record on logging, which has caused massive landslides in recent
years.

Unchecked, the larvae of the New World screw worm fly could have eaten
their way through 70 million head of livestock in five North African countries.
The fly could then have spread to the Middle East, southern Europe and Asia.

But Patrick Cunningham, director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s
Screw Worm Emergency Centre for North Africa, is confident that the pest
is no more. Workers have not found any infected animals since April and
no wild flies have been seen for six months.

The outbreak began in Libya in the summer of 1988 with an infected consignment
of livestock from South America. The FAO and the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD) raised more than $40 million to carry out
an eradication programme that relied on swamping the Libyan population of
New World screw worm flies with male flies that were irradiated to make
them sterile. The males mate with wild females whose eggs then fail to hatch.
The population eventually dies out.

The flies had infested 40 000 square kilometres of Libya, an area almost
the size of the Netherlands. At its peak, the programme was releasing 40
million sterile male flies over Libya each week. The flies are bred and
irradiated at a factory in Tuxtla Gutierrez, in Mexico. Cunningham said:
‘We were confident that we could eradicate the pest because of the experience
in the US and Mexico and because the pilot project showed that the sterile
male flies were of good quality.’

Female screw worm flies lay their eggs in open wounds. The maggots that
develop eat living tissue and can eventually kill the host animal (see ‘The
turn of the screw worm’, 91av, 9 June 1990).

Cunningham says there will be no more releases after this week but surveillance
will continue until next summer. If no cases arise between now and then,
the Libyan government will probably declare the country free of screw worm
next summer.