Ants, bees, and caterpillars: How the world should learn to share

We need to raise awareness of the need to redistribute the world’s resources, embracing the principle of sharing at all levels of society.

The current world economic system doesn't work. A world ruled by financiers and economists with no regard for human suffering or ecological damage is not sustainable. Unfair trading practices, set up by the World Trade Organisation and the G7 squeeze the third world to a point where famine and war are the result. When I think about the ever-worsening situation in the Third World I am reminded of an incident one summer in my childhood.

My sister and I went to stay with our aunt and uncle on their farm. When we arrived my uncle and aunt told us that the field of kale behind the farmhouse was full of caterpillars. Excitedly, we ran out into the field to look at them. Every leaf of every kale plant was covered in caterpillars, big ones, small ones and tiny ones.

As the days passed, the army of caterpillars marched across the field towards the house. They ate every leaf of every plant, leaving a forest of skeletons in their wake. Big fat caterpillars walked over the smaller ones, squashing them as they went. And when they reached the edge of the field they crawled towards the house, up the walls and in through the windows. We shut the windows. The caterpillars crawled over the gutters, up the roof and down the chimneys.

Everywhere we looked there were caterpillars: on the walls, the ceilings, under the chairs, in the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the toilet. They stuck to the walls and ceilings of the house, turned into chrysalises, then never hatched. Every one of those caterpillars died.

As I look at the world today I see the caterpillar metaphor in action. The rich crush the poor, with bombs, wars, crippling interest rates on loans and unfair trade. I see desperate poverty, leading to population explosions, and I see the destruction of the environment on a par with the caterpillar’s destruction of their field of kale.

Just as the caterpillars destroyed their source of sustenance, so we humans are destroying our environment. We are destroying the very source of the air we breathe: the tropical rain forests. Our rich, like the big fat caterpillars, get richer and fatter while our poor, like the small thin caterpillars, are crushed to death or left with nothing to eat.

But all, fat and thin, rich and poor, are crawling towards eventual self-destruction.

But there are other models in the insect kingdom. Both ants and bees base their success on co-operation; the sharing of duties and resources to build highly successful communities. Ants that live in the topical rain forest co-operate not only with each other but with every aspect of their environment. Bees also work together co-operatively. Some would say that the bee model is regimented and smacks of communism. But the model merely demonstrates that sharing benefits both the community and the environment.

Part of the human race knows that sharing is the responsible way forward: the part which created the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the hundreds of organisations that attempt to mitigate the disastrous consequences of unjust economic policies.

Even the World Bank was originally set up with a view to ending world poverty. But the problem with the world at the moment is that we do not have a queen bee, a head ant, a co-ordinating centre; in other words a world government. World power is in the hands of financiers, under the auspices of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. These institutions dictate the terms of trade and protect the interests of the West, to the detriment of the rest of the world. The world deserves better than this.

The Brandt Report (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/News/PressReleases/files/pr_africacom_brandt_bac…), for example, puts the needs of the world’s people first. It is the blueprint for a world government. Every member of the world’s society needs food, clean water, a roof over their heads, health care and education. The Brandt Report makes clear that we need to share responsibility for the world’s resources and the environment.

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in his book ‘Globalization and its Discontents’, explains in great detail how the current world economic situation evolved and what is wrong with it. The foundations of the current world economic system were laid by the United Nations in 1944 at Bretton Woods, in the US. Those present discussed how to rebuild war-ravaged Europe and as a result they set up an International Bank for the Reconstruction and Development of Europe. This later became the World Bank. They also set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to maintain world economic stability, so that there would be no more world economic depressions. As Joseph Stiglitz points out, these were good and worthy ideals at the time.

Over the years the power of the World Bank and the IMF, under the G7 (the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and the UK) grew and grew until they had economic dominion over the whole world. The World Trade Organisation was created, to set the price for third world exports, mainly raw materials and crops. The price for these commodities has fallen constantly ever since, making it harder and harder for these countries to repay the interest on their loans.

The economic system created in 1944 in the spirit of remorse and idealism, developed into a global economic network with a stranglehold over the third world. A world governed by financial institutions is not, and cannot be, a stable, sane or healthy world.

In the 1980s the World Bank and the IMF really began to squeeze the third world. It was during this period that Reagan and Thatcher came to power and began to promote the doctrine of monetarism and the free market economy. The IMF, the World Bank and the US treasury came to an agreement called the Washington Consensus (representatives of Third World countries were not invited to the meeting). They called for Capital Market Liberalization, i.e. forcing third world countries to open up to imports which they could not compete with, while using import tariffs to protect their own vulnerable industries.

The 1980s also saw the introduction of the iniquitous structural adjustment loans by the World Bank and the IMF. These loans were tied to so many conditions that third world governments were forced to cut back on essential spending, such as education and health programmes. This, over a period of decades has led to a worsening of health in the third world. Twelve million people now die of preventable diseases every year, and of these the largest number dies from dysentery and diarrhoea.

Since the people affected by diseases live in some of the poorest countries of the world, there is no incentive for the world’s pharmaceutical companies to put money into research and development of new drugs or vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies play an important part in Western health schemes, carrying out research and developing new medicines. But since they are inextricably linked into the current world economic system, which is driven by the profit motive and competition with each other, they feel that they are forced to gear their research towards finding drugs to treat the diseases which affect the developed world: cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc., drugs which they can sell at a profit. Only ten percent of research money worldwide is devoted to ninety percent of the world’s diseases.

The current world economic system is failing the majority of the world’s population. Profit-driven research will always be geared towards the development of drugs to treat the diseases of those who can pay. A world system based on sharing would look at need, rather than profit – as the driving force behind research.

A World Government based on the principle of sharing would share responsibility for the health of the world population, direct research and development towards all the diseases which affect the world, not just those that affect the West.

A world economic system based on sharing would want to share responsibility for the health of the world population. A world economic system based on sharing would want to preserve ancient knowledge of traditional medicine, share responsibility for protecting rare medicinal plants, for growing and harvesting these plants and making them available to all those in need.

The current economic system exploits the environment shamelessly, leading to its destruction. We are destroying the world’s tropical rain forests, an invaluable and irreplaceable source of medicinal plants.

Sharing is not just about sharing resources. It is also about the sharing of knowledge, both the high tech knowledge of the developed nations, and the detailed, intimate knowledge of the environment of the people who inhabit it. The current global economic system exploits both the environment and the people who live in it. The emphasis on profit denies all other values, such as traditional knowledge and respect for the environment. This is extremely dangerous, and if it continues will lead to complete ecological destruction, followed by the death of a large proportion of the human species. We need a world government to instil in everyone the necessity of sharing responsibility for the environment.

Sharing the world's resources, knowledge and responsibilities is the only way for the human species to survive. The infrastructure for such sharing is already in place. All that is required now is a shift of consciousness on the part of human kind, away from the idea that competition should be the basis of our economic system, towards the idea that sharing would be of benefit to all.

* Mohammed Mesbahi is the Chair and Founder of a London-based organisation called Share the World’s Resources (STWR). This article was submitted to Pambazuka News by email.

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