Malawi: too much globalization or too little? Ask the loggers.

■"Malawi Is Burning, and Deforestation Erodes Economy: A nation imperiled by foresters who make just $20 a month," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 1 November 2005, p. A3.

Globalization destroys the environment. Globalization impoverishes.

You hear these myths all the time.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you want to see serious environmental degradation, look at the states least connected to the global economy. If you want to see the most stringent enviro laws, check out the most globalized economies.

Multinational corporations come into impoverished countries and pay--on average--40 to 50% higher wages than the local economy.

How important is that to "saving the environment"?

Let the loggers of Malawi speak:

Mr. Juma and his friends are loggers, members of a vast fraternity that has illegally laid waste to half this nation, mostly in the last 15 years, all to hawk firewood and charcoal at roadside stands. [Not for export, mind you]

Because of them, experts say, Malawi loses nearly 200 square miles of its forests annually, a deforestation rate of 2.8 percent that the Southern Africa Development Community says is one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

The cutting blights a pastoral, sometimes breathtaking landscape. It dries up streams, pollutes the air, lowers the water table, erodes the soil and silts rivers so badly that, officials here say, hydroelectric plants are blacked out by the gunk.

It is hard to think of many other things that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could do that would damage the nation more.

The problem is that it is hard to think of many other ways that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could make a living, period.

"The problem is that we have nothing else to do," said Mr. Juma, a wiry 33-year-old with a neon green shirt tied around his bare waist, standing over the remains of the chopped-up masuku [tree]. "We have no money to raise our families. We have nowhere to run, nothing else to do. So we have to cut the trees to feed our families."

All this destruction to generate about $8m in income a year for all those loggers.

Imagine just how much they'd love to be "exploited" by a big old Western multinational corporation.

More than 60% of the Malawis live on less than a dollar a day, the official global standard for extreme poverty. The global average is 20%. Most live in rural areas, and so their hopes to escape poverty are nil.

This is the essense of the journey from the Gap to the Core: from the rural to the city, from no job to a job, from no income to some income, from women as birthing machines to women as factor workers, from devastating the environment to having a stake in its survival.

The reason why the loggers cut down the trees is that less than 2% of the public are hooked to the electrical grid, so that's how they heat homes and cook food. Simple as that.

Malawi is landlocked, but full of cheap labor just waiting to be "exploited."



Too much globalization?

Not enough, my friends, not enough.

Guess who's right next door to Malawi? Robert Mugabe's imprisoned Zimbabwe. Guess what he does for property values and the investment climate?

Think it doesn't matter for the environment? Think again. It's all connected.