off-the-cuff freewriting for an article: environmentalism in Taiwan
Not in the same country as my backyard
Originally uploaded by crispy47. I spent my Sunday in a small motorboat on the Erren River (二仁溪) in southern Taiwan. Except for a light membrane of garbage along the shore, most of the river is picturesque. High, reedy dark-earth banks and a scattering of attractively scraggly deciduous trees. In an old Chinese painting, there might be a solitary fisherman in a conical straw hat sitting in the shade meditatively.
But this was not a painting. The wake of our boat was unnaturally frothy and brown; an astonishingly noxious smell drifted in from a slurry factory just out of sight; and at certain points on the bank, thin black tarps held down with chicken wire covered massive, tightly compressed piles of old motherboards. I did notice a few people fishing, but our guide-head of a small local save-the-river group-said they were migrant Thai or Filipino workers unable to read the Mandarin warning signs. Because of indulgences granted to local and foreign business during Taiwan's long economic boom, the Erren River remains a toxic disaster even after the vast improvements made by a recently bankrupted government cleanup project. This, I have heard over and over again last week, is the price of globalization.
I went down south as part of an entourage of Taiwanese environmentalists, plus two American NGO people, another journalist, and a guy from Greenpeace China (Greenpeace normally doesn't operate in Taiwan). Here are some lessons I've learned this week:Never work for RCA
Never recycle electronics
Never buy anything made by Apple (I'm typing this on a PowerBook)
Never be a farmer
Never drink water or eat anything that has touched water. Don't live near it either. Water will bring you only birth defects, cancer, and death
The stories of immoral and illegal behavior on the part of companies, and callous compliance on the part of governments, are too numerous and diverse in their heinousness for me to recount right now. Plus you've heard them before.
But fine, I'll tell just one.
On Saturday, we met with the Houli Self Help Association (后里自救會). Houli is a famously beautiful little farming town, and the planned site of "phase two" of the Central Taiwan Science Park. Industry has already started to creep into Houli, in the the form of two big factories and an industrial-waste incinerator, all unrelated to the science park. Locals say that cancer rates have been going up, and, demonstrating unusual wherewithal, they've had some of the local produce tested and found increased levels of heavy metals like lead and zinc in their fruit.
And so the Self-Help Association was formed to oppose the Science Park. The relationship between the two is a little like a classic cartoon rivalry between a wily mouse and much larger cat, except where the cat has a bulldozer, and the mouse has no arms or legs.
Their frustration is understandable, and showed during our meeting. Some of the speakers were eloquent; others were more inclined toward inarticulate ranting against the government, against change, against any sort of high-tech production, and against the United States. The anti-Americanism was particularly interesting-the consensus seems to be that the US takes the industries it doesn't want and ships them abroad, rather than that countries compete to bring in business. In fact, manufacturing in the US and Canada combined (I'm not sure about the US alone) has grown to over 25% of the world's total; Taiwan is around 1.3%. Adjusted for population, the ratio is about 1.3 : 1. And in certain ways Taiwan's government does better at environmental protection than the US. Most notably, their EPA is actually staffed by environmentalists. The minister himself is an old activist who sighs when he gets to talking about the vast industrial forces he is up against.
But in another sense, the farmers are right. High-tech production in the US is responsible for cleaning up after itself, and for the most part is held to that responsibility. Communities have a good deal more leverage there, and companies are obligated by law both to disclose the nature of whatever gunk their smokestacks and drainage ditches spew forth and to provide financial assistance to local groups wanting to run tests on their water, soil, or air. Taiwan's head industrial-waste-disposal guy is usually energetic and upbeat-ask him about enacting a "right to know" law in Taiwan, and he mutters that companies "don't feel comfortable" having such information available to the public.
The traditional argument used by companies, the old trade-secrets bit, turns out not to hold water. The US law includes a provision allowing companies to keep legitimate secrets private, but in the years since the law was passed, not a single application has been filed. The two American activists I spoke to, who head one of the groups responsible for the law, say that the real reason high-tech manufacturers guard these "trade secrets" is so that locals like the Houli farmers can't establish more than a circumstantial connection between factories and environmental and health problems.
The environmentalists I've been hanging out with keep talking about "sustainable development," and arguing that if only companies would look beyond quarterly profits, they would see that "going green" is actually the best business strategy. This is incorrect. Companies-at least those listed on American stock exchanges-have a legal obligation to work for their shareholders. With the exception of an increasing but still small number of "ethical" investors groups, shareholders' primary concern is for their money. This all but mandated by the physics of capitalism, since those whose primary concern is money are more likely to have a lot of it, which makes them bigger investors, which gives them more power.
For example, Taiwan's second-largest international brand is Asus, which manufactures computer components and also has its own brand. Asus has been making a big push toward environmentally friendy production recently, and Asus-branded computers are all compliant with the EU's non-binding Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive (Asian organizations serious about environmentalism tend to cleave to EU standards). But when it manufactures components for other companies, says a member the Asus team in charge of its greening-up, "If they say, 'Hey, you don't have to be RoHS-compliant,' we're not going to go ahead and do that anyway." She admits that "so far green policies eat up a lot of money without creating a profit. We tell the salespeople we can turn this into a tool for promotion-it's what they want to hear," says the Asussian, not sounding too convinced. Unless "GreenASUS" can actually start selling more computers, sooner or later the counters will wise up. Only when ethics become profitable or legally inevitable will they become widely adopted.
To see how unethical production methods are currently both profitable and sustainable, look at Apple's "iPod City"-the huge factory run by Foxconn (鴻海, a Taiwanese company) in China where tens of thousands of workers live in really crappy conditions so that my computer doesn't have to be even more overpriced than it already is. Despite a lot of media attention on this issue, Apple just reported its best quarter ever, with revenues of US$7.1 billion. Steve Jobs recently said, "OK Greenpeace, you can get out of the computer business now-go save some whales." If green buying does become popular, Apple can simply fire Jobs and pressure Foxconn to treat its workers better-but better for Apple's stockholders if to wait until that actually becomes an issue.
Granted, the Foxconn issue has to do more with working conditions than pollution, but they idea that polluting industries are fundamentally unsustainable is one that looks too far into humanity's future. Almost as a matter of law, companies won't worry about turning the world into an industrial wasteland until it begins to damage their profits. It will be a long time before people are too sick from industrial pollution to want to work on a production line.
So at least for now, it's mostly up to governments to protect their people. And since the science park is a government project there's not much the Houli Self-Help Association can do. Anyway, its case is valid only up to a point. Like many of the small environmental groups in Taiwan, its goal is not to regulate development, but to stop it entirely. It's hard to blame them: beyond concrete issues like the of proximity industrial drainage to irrigation ditches, there is a sense that the farmers feel as if a science park threatens their very way of life, which it probably does. Unpleasant as it sounds, the loss of idyllic farmland-and even the more drastic pollution of the Erren River-is probably not too high a price to pay for Taiwan's prosperity.
Even evil Foxconn has its proponents. "Once you actually go to the factory and meet the workers, it's a lot more complicated," the Greenpeace guy told me. "Rural farmers can make maybe two or three hundred dollars a year. In one of these factories, they can actually save something, which their families can use for education. Plus they get the chance to move away from home and see the city, and have some freedom and money for the first time." In other words, though it is still a form of exploitation, the alternative is much worse.
And that's Foxconn. Taiwanese standards are much higher. The already-completed dormitory for "phase one" of the Central Taiwan Science Park is clean, has collegiate facilities, and is free for migrant workers and cheap for Taiwanese. The fifteen thousand "operators"-the science-park proletariat-probably have better working hours than you do: ten-hour shifts, two days on, two days off. In their off time, most of the two thousand dorm residents leave to live with their families. Even the Americans seemed impressed. Although the farmers' rights should certainly be protected, it's hard to argue that Taiwan would be better off without the science park.
It's also hard to argue that the abuses Taiwan suffered in the past were an unnecessary price. The only reason Taiwan can afford to impose more regulations now is that the quality of its workforce and infrastructure, and the size of its market make it worthwhile. Had it not developed earlier, it would be in the same boat as developing Asian countries.
The American environmentalists gripe that companies use China to hold Taiwanese jobs "for ransom." The Taiwanese EPA feels the same way. Still, Taiwan ought to be doing somewhat more than it is. Most importantly, given the apparently bogus nature of the trade-secrets argument, locals should be allowed to know the nature of the waste that is being dumped and burned in their area. There will be some unpalatable demands that result from this, but there will also be reasonable ones. Furthermore, say the Americans, a nearly imperceptibly tiny fraction of the (huge) subsidies given to the science park would go a long way toward allowing locals to protect themselves from some of the effects of pollution by identifying problems that in many cases can be fixed cheaply and easily. Environmentalism may never be profitable, whatever NGOs say, but it is possible to literate environmental protections that are also economically literate.