A Few Facts

Maude Barlow heads the Council of Canadians — Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. She’s founder of the Blue Planet Project. SOYMB posts this extract from a speech she made at a public meeting in Toronto during the G8/G20 government conclave. Between 900 and 1,000 people are believed to have been arrested at the protests, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. More than a billion dollars, it’s believed, were spent on so-called security, the most expensive security event in Canadian history.

MAUDE BARLOW: On the eve of this G-20 gathering, let’s look at a few facts.

Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history.
The richest 2% own more than half the household wealth in the world.
The richest 10% hold 85% of total global assets and the bottom half of humanity owns less than 1% of the wealth in the world.
The three richest men in the world have more money than the poorest 48 countries.

Fact, while those responsible for the 2008 global financial crisis were bailed out and even rewarded by the G-20 government’s gathering here, the International Labor Organization tells us that in 2009, 34 million people were added to the global unemployed, swelling those ranks to 239 million, the highest ever recorded. Another 200 million are at risk in precarious jobs and the World Bank tells us that at the end of 2010, another 64 million will have lost their jobs.
By 2030, more than half the population of the megacities of the Global South will be slumdwellers with no access to education, health care, water, or sanitation.

Fact, global climate change is rapidly advancing, claiming at least 300,000 lives and $125 billion in damages every year. Called the silent crisis, climate change is melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban centers.

Fact, half the tropical forests in the world, the lungs of our ecosystem, are gone.
By 2030, at the present rate of extraction or so-called harvest, only 10% will be left standing. 90% of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practice. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise, there is no blue frontier left. Half the world’s wetlands, the kidneys of our ecosystem, have been destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate 1,000 times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward of biodiversity deficit in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than nature can replace them with new ones.

Fact, we are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, two million tons of sewage and industrial agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water. That’s the equivalent of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of waste water produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. We are minding our ground water faster than we can replenish it, sucking it to grow water guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities who dump an astounding 700 trillion liters of land-based water into oceans every year as waste.
The global mining industry sucks up another 800 trillion liters which it also leaves behind as poison and fully one-third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. Nearly three billion people on our planet do not have running water within a kilometer of their home and every eight seconds, somewhere in our world, a child is dying of waterborne disease. The global water crisis is getting steadily worse with reports of countries from India to Pakistan to Yemen facing depletion. The World Bank says that by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40%.

Fact, knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the Global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geopolitical ramifications. Rich countries faced by food shortages have already bought up an area in Africa alone more than twice the size of the United Kingdom.


The G8/G20 leaders are actually the executive of the capitalist class of their respective countries and are the staunchest defenders of neoliberal corporate globalisation, the custodians of privilege and corporate power and the guardians of world capitalism. They help rule the world and maintain the playing field for profit-hungry western corporations. Together they have the power to dictate who eats and who starves, who lives and who dies, to declare war regardless of the wishes of the people who elected them. Their policies have resulted in global poverty and environmental destruction. They met in Toronto to decide on which international strategies they can commonly pursue, allegedly in the interests of the people of the word and the natural environment. Yet, capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s suffering billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. Moreover, reform can be so packaged and camouflaged as to be acceptable whilst leaving the real grievances unaddressed. The world’s leaders simply cannot be depended upon to implement real change because they can only ever act as the executive of corporate capitalism.


Everywhere where the world’s ruling elite have assembled to decide their next step they have been met with protests and demonstrations that have attracted tens and even hundreds of thousands. Thousands of speeches such as Maude Barlow's have been made, thousands of articles have been written and hundreds of books have been published that explore the aims, objectives and the alternatives offered by the anti-globalisation movement. What is now clear is that the anti-globalisation, no matter how sincere and well-meaning, does not seek to replace capitalism with any real alternative social system. At best it attracts a myriad of groups, all pursuing their own reformist agenda. Some call for greater corporate responsibility. Some demand the restructuring of international institutions like the IMF or the World Bank . Others call for the expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions, debt cancellation and more aid. All, however, fail to address the root cause of the problems - capitalism. All promote that damnable system which they are seemingly critical of by applauding any meagre reform . The protesters in Toronto at the G8/G20 might think they are united in common cause, but in truth they are only united in supporting capitalism and in their mistaken belief that poverty and ecological destruction can be legislated out of existence. They have no blueprint for real fundamental change.

It is now no longer a utopian fantasy – but a practical, revolutionary proposition – to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. We have the science, the technology and the know-how.
All that is missing is the will – the desire to make that next great historical advance possible; a confidence in ourselves as masters of our own destiny and to realise that it is possible to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to re-fashion a world in our own interests.

How soon this happens depends upon us all – each and every one of us.