Some years ago when I first read Samantha Power’s book on genocide A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide I remember being so shocked, not just by the descriptions of appalling cruelty, apathy and duplicity but by the realization that many of the countries listed were ones I, as a humanitarian worker, had served in or worked with, and often during those periods of genocide. The shock was that I had been part of that history and at the time (apart from Rwanda) had not thought of the various “humanitarian crises” as theaters of genocide. Genocide was there and I was not cognizant of it.
That same uncomfortable shock came over me again when I read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. From Iraq to New Orleans to the tsunami hit coasts of Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Thailand, Klein shows how the fear and disruption that accompanies the suffering of crisis has been cynically exploited to push through the privatization of national assets and the corporate grab for real estate, profitable service provision and the extraction of wealth from already poor communities. Klein is not alone in uncovering this phenomena.
Gunewardana and Shuller do much the same in their edited volume Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reduction showing how crisis has been used to push through unwelcome policies and changes in Haiti, Guatemala and other countries.
According to Greg Berger and Ben Wisner, in a paper circulated on the internet this week, “victims of last year's massive flooding in Chiapas are being offered loans and grants by the Mexican government to resume their farming activities, but with a catch. They need to agree to stop growing corn and beans (their traditional crops) and replace them with African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis, native to West Africa), an important emerging source of biodiesel.” As they put it in the paper’s title, this is disaster capitalism moving into the blackmail business.
Earlier this week the New York times reported how fear around the present global crisis of food and fuel prices is being used to in Japan, Korea, the USA and some European countries to relax legislation allowing for more genetically modified crops to be planted.
The opportunism to profit, both financially and in terms of power grabs, from disaster is not new. When San Francisco was devastated in 1906 by earthquake and fire, the city rebuilt quickly, relaxing building and sanitation codes and grabbing land previously occupied by minority communities, but now viewed as prime real estimate. By the time of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 the city was totally rebuilt, but for the city fathers and business sector, not the Chinese immigrant population for instance, most of who’s dead and displaced were simply not counted in the published statistics.
So the question is, now that these issues are out in the open, that they are being publicize in the popular press and not just the fringe media, will aid agencies, who bear witness to these economic crimes alongside human rights crimes, have the courage and competence to expose this dark side of disaster reconstruction?
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