Africa, Tropical Timber, Turfs, and Trade by Owusu J. Henry;

Author:Owusu, J. Henry; [Owusu, J. Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Structural Adjustment, the Timber Trade, and Turf Degradation

Political Convenience and Desperate Deforestation

Ghana’s adoption of the free-market based Economic Recovery Program in 1983 at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund marked a major policy watershed in its timber trade, with implications, inter alia, for the country’s development and the physical environment—the natural turf, namely the geographic or ecological region where the tropical timber grows, and which can be sustained or compromised by human actions or inactions and development. As shown in figure 5.3, and table 5.3, relative to the pre-adjustment years, a dramatic turn-around began to take place in 1983, the year the adjustment program began with a steady expansion in timber exports. The associated economic changes from the program were touted, as we noted earlier, by the sponsors and the international financial community as a big success—a claim that has been widely disputed, particularly by critics of the IMF and the World Bank. Critics such as George (1988, 1992) and Hayter (1989), argue that, on the contrary, SAPs cause, inter alia, widespread environmental destruction, while simultaneously emptying the adjusting debtor countries of their natural resources. In addition, the program renders adjusting countries less able to service their debt each year, and precludes investment in economic recovery (George, 1992). Following the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), which emphasized the importance of using resources to meet our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs, there has been increasing awareness of global environmental issues. In light of such awareness, a number of non-government organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and Friends of the Earth have also shown that growth under adjustment, as promoted by the IMF and the World Bank, involves huge environmental costs (see Owusu, 1998).

This chapter argues that Ghana’s Economic Recovery Program demonstrates that SAPs provide a convenient means for governments of developing economies and their international capitalist sponsors to meet mutual current economic and political interests. These interests are usually met by sacrificing the physical environment through desperate actions such as overexploitation of natural resources so that the immediate convenience of meeting those interests generates huge environmental costs for the adjusting country. This position is tied to two important perspectives on debt and Third World development, the first of which holds that a vital part of the political and economic control mechanisms available to the Western industrialized countries to maintain control of their turfs in Third World countries such as Ghana is to keep them in debt (see Sawyerr, 1990). The second view holds that there is a direct relation between the high foreign debts of developing countries and the rapid rate of deforestation, and that the IMF and the World Bank’s export-oriented development model, via adjustment, is largely responsible for the deforestation and environmental damage (see George, 1992). This chapter therefore contributes to the debate on structural adjustment and environmental consequences in the development process of Third World economies, particularly the relationship between foreign debt and deforestation (e.

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