Environment, Development & Arms Control

Interview by Vicky Busch

Author, parliamentarian, and diplomat, Douglas Roche was Canada's Ambassador for Disarmament from 1984 until 1989. Before that, from 1972 to 1984, he was elected to the Canadian Parliament four times. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from St. Stephen's College, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Alberta. And he has been honored with the Christian Culture Gold Medal Award; the Alberta Premier's Award for Excellence, and the Peace Award of the World Federalists of Canada. He has written nine books. His latest, Building Global Security: Agenda for the 1990's, describes how the arms race, world poverty, environmental degradation, and staggering debt can only be solved by new international partnerships. He is presently Distinguished Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta.

Aurora: The image of the starving child has in the past been used to symbolize the problems of the Third World. What image today could Canadians keep in mind as they become more aware of Third World issues?

Roche: Well, when it comes to putting up a picture for the purposes of inspiring and animating, I think it's hard to beat a picture of the earth as taken from outer space. The full-colour poster available from the World Federalists Association depicts in very dramatic terms the oneness of the planet. I think that as we move into the 1990s, we are beginning to understand the interlocking nature of such global problems as the arms race, of development, and the environment. Strategies that have been put out by the United Nations in these three prime areas of human activity coalesce in the quest for common security. That picture reminds us of the need today for a holistic approach to the world that embraces new international partnerships to deal with common problems that no one country can by itself solve.

Aurora: How much awareness is needed before people are moved to act?

Roche: Well, let's put it this way, if good sermons or political speeches could save the world, the world would have been saved a long time ago. There is a gulf between understanding and the will to act. What we have to do is try to animate people within their own circumstances. It's pretty hard to get society here, for example, focused on problems that are perceived to be far away. We've got to understand that those problems are impacting onus. Certainly one dramatic example of global problems that impact on us are the environmental problems: the warming of the climate, the destruction of forests, the pollution of our own water and air by industrial wastes right here in Canada. That is something that has a direct connection with the global realities of environmental destruction.

And so the greening of Canadian attitudes is a big step to personal involvement in the quest for security, security defined today as lessened military activity and increased development and environmental activity.

We all live at a local level with the immense global problems. And I think that a new effort has to be made to form coalitions of groups right here in our own communities. There are very deep and active movements of NGOs in the disarmament field, similarly so in the development and environment fields.

We need new coalitions of disarmament, development, and environment groups working together to make a joint impress on the political system in Canada. Together I think that such groups can have an impact in the promotion and development of both public opinion in Canada and pressure on the political system to respond with stronger, more dynamic leadership in the world community. That is how you relate the local to the global. We cannot do it alone. I find it shocking that so little joint activity has been done so far. As I go across the country, I see a lot of wonderful people in Canada. If they worked together they could make a stronger contribution than is now being made to common security.

You see, since I wrote Justice Not Charity, now some fifteen years ago, world problems have increased. For example, in the midseventies there were something like twenty two thousand nuclear weapons and now there's about fifty two thousand. The number of malnourished and impoverished people has doubled to close to a billion. Arms race expenditures have doubled. The major problems are racing out of control despite the so-called solutions that are being offered by governments. Those solutions are really bandaids. They are not getting at the root of the problem which is militarism and discrimination against Third World countries by the western nations that have maintained their control over the world's economic and trading systems.

Aurora: Can you give us some examples of some solutions that aren't bandaids?

Roche: Sure. In the arms control and disarmament field the achieving of a comprehensive test ban treaty would be getting at the root of the arms race. The bandaid is the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by President Reagan and President Gorbachev in 1987 which eliminated intermediate range nuclear missiles. That was an accomplishment, but it involved only four percent of all nuclear weapons, and it allows the development of new weapons. We are now moving into the third generation of nuclear weapons that will be laser directed. As the arms race continues to expand in both quantitative and qualitative terms, we see the effects of continuing militaristic thinking. So the INF is a bandaid.

A deep cure for the arms race would be a comprehensive test ban treaty and ceasing of modernizing of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the major powers, those who have nuclear weapons, are today in violation of their commitment to the nonproliferation treaty to cease the arms race. And if we expect the nonproliferation treaty to last beyond its terminal date of 1995, if we expect the NPT to do the job of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons out into other countries at a time when 24 Third World countries are acquiring ballistic missile technology, we are sadly mistaken. We will not be able to stop the horizontal spread of nuclear weapons if we do not stop the vertical spread, if we do not stop the continued development of nuclear weapons by those who already have them.

You see, the world is divided now into a two-class state in the view of such countries as India, Brazil, Argentina and so on. They wonder why it is possible that the major powers can have unrestricted nuclear weapons while they can never have nuclear weapons. They equate power, prestige, and status in the world with the possession of nuclear weapons. Now, those are grave questions that will affect the continuation of security on the planet.

In the development field we have also been applying bandaids to major problems. There are a billion people who are deprived of what we would call fundamental aspects of living: clean water, food, a decent education, adequate hygiene, and sanitation. Those are problems that could be quite easily remedied if the countries concerned had equal access to world trading systems. The problem is that the price of the commodities which they export are controlled by the industrialized countries, and the developing countries are not able to earn the income needed to develop their own people.

Moreover, when the debt increases, as it has in alarming ways in Third World countries, the International Monetary Fund then applies very strict conditions for the alleviation of that debt that then shut off the availability of capital for continued development. The result of this is that in the past few years, 37 countries in the Third World reduced their health and education expenditures by somewhere between 35 and 50 per cent. The direct result has been an increase in deaths and the extension of poverty in the very countries that are most severely disadvantaged in the first place.

The answer to this is not just foreign aid, although I do not want to be misunderstood in that comment. I believe that foreign aid called Official Development Assistance must continue and must be increased. Countries need that, and it is only right, it is only equitable that we share. We are not sharing enough. That being said, ODA itself cannot do the job.

The problems are astounding in Third World countries. The world will have an increase of 90 million people per year up to the year 2000. Ninety percent of those births will be in developing countries. The problems are compounded when, for example, whole populations are reduced to stripping mountains of fuel wood. The resulting climatic danger and destruction further exacerbates the environmental conditions.

A pronounced, single example of what I mean has been occurring in Bangladesh, a country of 120 million people who in the last two years have seen devastating floods. Some eighty per cent of Bangladesh has been flooded as a result of the stripping of forests in the surrounding countries of Nepal and northern India. The monsoons, instead of being absorbed into the mountains as has customarily been the case, just rolled down bringing millions of tons of silt into rivers that expanded and caused immense suffering and deaths. This is certainly one example of why nations alone cannot solve problems. They are interlocked with other nations.

Answers to these problems of impeded development and increasing environmental destruction related to population growth are contained in the study on world environment and development headed by the former Prime Minister of Norway. The Brundtland Report called for a process of sustainable development where capital would be put into the developing countries. In turn, the developing countries would shut down their devastating high military expenditures.

The key to the Third World countries spending less on military is for the major nations, particularly those of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to stop their high spending on military. So, we see again the interlocking nature of development, environment, and arms race problems. This requires a better management system for the world. That is why the Security Council must be strengthened and use its powers to have such things as a World Environment Agency or a World Verification Agency that would be under the Security Council mandate.

We are not helpless in the midst of these problems. What we need is increased public understanding, public support, and political leadership. The most exciting and promising political leader in the world today who understands these problems, who is in a position to make a really strong difference in world relations, who can contribute not only to the deceleration of East-West tensions but to the increase of global understanding is Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev has to survive in the Soviet Union with his perestroika program in order to have a real impact in the world. And in order for him to survive, he needs more western co-operation than he has yet received.

Aurora: What would you say to individuals who have been giving money, who've been sponsoring a child, who've been thinking about volunteering to work overseas? Are those bandaid solutions considering the massive problems you've mentioned?

Roche: These are not bandaids. These are whole-hearted and fully participatory methods that are being used by individuals. In some cases they are doing all that they can. All work that you've described and more is to be commended and supported and enlarged, because that is the awakening of global consciousness at the local level would encourage people to be involved, and you don't have to go to a Third World country to be involved. Right here in our own midst there are many Third World students. Why not bring them in and have dinner with them, invite them to our home, let them see our life, let them see that we care about them. Similarly with visitors now from Eastern countries.

I think that it's important that we increase such activities as personal relationships, the twinning of cities, and encouraging children to have pen pals in other countries. All that manner of activity shows that Canadians do have a heart and do have some deep caring about conditions in the world. What I don't want to see is people throw up their hands in despair and say all these problems are too big and we can't handle them. It's true they operate at the macro level in the relationship of global strategies, but they also operate at a micro level right here in our own communities, too.

Ten Things You Can Do

In 1975 Douglas Roche, then Member of Parliament for Edmonton-Strathcona, wrote Justice Not Charity: A New Global Ethic for Canada. In that, his fourth book, he outlined practical, day-to-day measures that individual Canadians could take to become more aware of Third World issues. He suggested, for example, that we think “necessity” when we buy. “If you don't need that dishwasher, why buy it?” Or that we raise our awareness by finding out who Mother Teresa is or by reading Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful.

Fifteen years later, he now strongly interconnects global security and environmental concerns with development issues. Although his sights are broader these days, shaped by his move to a more global working environment as Canada's Ambassador for Disarmament for the past five years, he still sees that change ultimately depends on individual action. “Treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics or anything, sooner or later comes down to one single, solitary soul. We're down to you and me.”

Though some of his original suggestions for individual action may now be dated—dishwashers seem a necessity, and Mother Teresa is a household name—many continue to answer those who ask, “What can I do to help the starving, the diseased, and the dying on the other side of the world?” And the answer, as trite as it may sound, is still an incentive for action: “If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.”

The following have been taken from Roche's original list of “45 Things You Can Do” in Justice Not Charity: A New Global Ethic.