development
This year people are focusing their attention on Africa. We've had the Blair Africa Commission. We've had all this attention from the Geldofs of the world on Africa. People look at organisations like Oxfams, Boxfams, Doxfams, all these charitable organisations, people like Comic Relief etc. and they put a great deal of attention on Africa. But actually is this the kind of attention that we want?
I feel the policies of the G8 has really affected the Nigerian people because these days you know we hear of Nigerian immigrants everywhere as illegal immigrants. And it's mostly the policies of the Western countries that has actually pushed people out of Nigeria. Because the high level of unemployment, the poverty and the educational policies too. It has really affected the young people in Nigeria because their parents can not actually pay for their school fees, because part of the IMF conditionalities is that they should 'hands off' tertiary education in Nigeria. And that has really affected the Nigerian people, because they can hardly feed themselves thoughtless of sending their children to university.
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My name is Marilda. I'm an activist and geographer participating in a movement that struggles against this development model, monoculture, industrial, exporting. Brazil is a victim of this world policy in which G8 represents the countries leading this logic. And what I have to say is that the speeches that come out of G8 regarding measures against poverty, environmental measures related to climate, the issue of the carbon market… we here understand that as a big hypocrisy. Because what causes poverty, what causes environmental and socio-environmental damage is exactly this developmental model, the logic of production, the consuming logic of the capitalist society. What is ending poverty for the G8? If their actions are fundamentally aiming at appropriating land mainly from poor countries, adapting these territories in an transnational organization, with their governments saying “Yes!
There's a huge impact of G8 capital basically coming into a country like India in the natural resource sector in the name of bilateral funding, DFID, JBIC and all those. And what they are basically doing is that they are first going into policy reforms. Then they're promoting privatisation of resources like water. And then they are penetrating into taking control over the varied and natural resource base on which millions of Indian communities are actually surviving for their livelihoods. And in that process, what they're doing, they're restricting access to those varied and natural resources that the communities are living for centuries.
The G8 is a economic united front of some of the most powerful countries in the world. So once they put up a united economic front, they will be in a position to exploit the markets and resources of the whole world. And in particular the developing countries will be suffering the effect. Now what we see today is that 70% of Indian population depends on agriculture for its sustenance and livelihood. And now agriculture sector is going to be affected very very negatively. If multinationals make their entry, big multinational companies, in the agriculture sector, then what happens to almost 20-25% of the agricultural workers in India? Because multinationals will have their agriculture with big machines. What happens to millions and millions of sharecroppers? What happens to the small peasantry?
Well I'm a Nigerian and I actually demand I demand that we should be left alone to develop our own democracy. Because its obvious we have not benefitted from Western type of democracy. I also demand and say no to SAP. We are tired and fed up of SAP. By SAP I mean the Structural Adjustment Programmes. Because what we have now is Structural Adjusted lives. We have all adjusted to whatever policies of the IMF, through the Structural Adjustment Programmes. People have adjusted by running away. By being immigrants. They have adjusted by being prostitutes. Children have adjusted by being street children. So really I say no to Structural Adjustment programmes because it has impacted negatively on our lives in Nigeria.
G8, we don't want your model of development. We don't want your money. We don't want your solidarity. We want to build another world. We want another country, another civil society. For us The G8 is not the solution for the planet. On the contrary G8 means more problems and more poor people in the world.