[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 92 (Monday, July 11, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7981-S7982]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page S7981]]
REMARKS OF DR. WANGARI MAATHAI
Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I recently had the honor of meeting with
Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya.
Dr. Maathai began a program of planting trees in 1976. She developed
it into a grassroots organization that emphasized tree planting by
women and children in order to conserve the environment and improve
their quality of life. This program, which became known as the Green
Belt Movement, has assisted women in planting more than 20 million
trees throughout the world.
Dr. Maathai is internationally recognized for a lifelong dedication
to democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She has
addressed the U.N. on several occasions and spoke on behalf of women at
special sessions of the General Assembly for the 5-year review of the
earth summit.
Earlier this year, Dr. Maathai gave an address inaugurating the World
Food Law Institute's ``Distinguished Lecture Series.'' I ask unanimous
consent that a copy of her remarks be printed in the Record for the
benefit of my colleagues.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Inaugural World Food Law Distinguished Lecture, Howard University World
Food Law Lunch, Cosmos Club, Washington, DC,
May 10, 2005.--Thank you very much. Professor Marsha
Echols, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a unique
pleasure and privilege and indeed honor to be here and to be
received so warmly by you here in Washington, DC.
I think that one of the most humbling experiences I have is
that when you do these things you don't do them thinking that
other people are noticing and you don't do them so that one
day you may be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. So, it is always
very humbling to know that there were people who were
watching and there were people who were appreciative of what
we were doing. But we all now acknowledge that what the
Norwegian Nobel Committee did on the day they decided that
they wanted to focus on the environment for the very first
time was both historic and visionary. It was a way of urging
us to make a mind-shift in the way we think about security,
in the way we think about peace, and to understand that you
cannot achieve peace without looking at the environment.
Those of us who have been working on peace,
democratization, environment movements, in women's movements,
we always felt that indeed these issues are related, but
nobody could have said it so dramatically and with so much
persuasion as the Norwegian Nobel Committee. As I was trying
to explain from my own perspective how these issues are
related, I was inspired by a metaphor that I have been using.
The metaphor is an African, traditional stool with three
legs. A traditional African stool is actually made from one
log and then three legs are chiseled out and a seat is also
chiseled out in the middle so that when you sit, you sit on
this basin, which rests on three legs.
I compare the three legs to the three pillars that the
Norwegian Nobel Committee identified. One leg is that of
peace. The other is that of democratic space, where rights
are respected--women's rights, human rights, environmental
rights, children's rights, where there is space for
everybody, where minorities and the marginalized can find
space. The third leg is the environment, that needs to be
managed sustainably, equitably, and in a transparent way, the
resources of which also need to be shared equitably.
That word ``equitably'' is very important in the management
of those resources. If you look at many of the conflicts we
have in the world, they are often due to the fact that we do
manage our resources but we do not share them equitably. Or
we manage our resources so poorly that they become degraded,
depleted and so we start fighting over the little that is
left. That happens at the national level, at the regional
level, or even at the global level. So these three pillars,
the pillar of peace, the pillar of the environment, and the
pillar of democratic space, are extremely important for any
state that intends to be stable. For when a state rests on
these three pillars then the basin of the seat becomes the
space, the environment, the milieu in which we can do
development. Here we can meet as donors, as states, as
financiers. We feel secure, we feel safe, because we are
resting safely on those three pillars.
In many regions, not least my own, many countries are
resting on two legs, some are resting on one leg, and some
have no legs at all. We know how desperate the situation can
be when the basin is literally on the ground. No development
can take place. That to me is the main message that this
Prize has brought to the world. To urge us as human society
to rethink how we develop and to understand that we cannot
force development, we cannot keep that basin up, if those
three legs are not stable, and that we have to invest in
those three legs. We have to invest in the environment. We
have to invest in cultures of peace, continuously and
deliberately. We have to invest in cultures of
democratization, of democratic space. I prefer to call it
democratic space because if I say democracy some people might
feel like that's not exactly what they want to describe. But
democratic space gives us a space to be ourselves, a space to
be creative, a space to be self-respecting, a space to feel
good about ourselves, a space to dream, and a space to
aspire. We can do all that if the three pillars are safe.
That is true whether it's a small country like Kenya or a
big country like the United States of America. This is the
message that we have been challenged to embrace, to think
about. And for development agencies this is a real challenge,
because many development agencies think that what government
needs is money, that if you can give them as much money as
possible they will develop. Well, for the last forty years or
so in Africa we have seen that pouring money there doesn't
help. We need to strengthen those three pillars. Where you
see a stable state and a state where people are appreciated,
governments are investing in people rather than in weapons,
they are investing in education, quality education, giving
people the skills and the technology they need in order to
exploit the resources that are within their borders, that's a
state that feels stable, that doesn't feel threatened. Then
it is able and willing to invest in its people.
Otherwise, you have just a small group of people trying to
balance themselves in that basin, and because the legs are
either not there or they are wobbly, no development can take
place.
Today I was going to talk about food, essentially, and
development and peace. I thought that if I started with that
vision of the African traditional stool you would understand
that you cannot have security in food if you do not have that
pillar of the environment. I want to give you an example from
Kenya. I want to show you how you can be very food insecure
because you are interfering with a mountain.
Those of you who know Kenya know that we have five
mountains, but I'll talk about the two mountains on the
equator: Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. These two mountains,
their tributaries create the largest river in Kenya. Along
this river are millions of people and national parks, all the
way to the very precious marine national park at the coast.
The millions of people who live along the valley of this
river enjoy farming and pastoralism, and of course in the
national parks we have wildlife.
The people who live upstream are largely farmers, and they
grow coffee and tea. Coffee and tea are some of the most
basic and most important economic industries in the country.
Tea, coffee and tourism are the main powerhouses of the
economy in the country. Now, those three--tea, coffee, and
tourism--depend on rainfall and water coming from those
mountains. If you do not have enough water coming down the
streams, you will not be able to supply agriculture,
especially the irrigation schemes, along that river. And
there are literally thousands of people who depend on that.
One thing that we have been doing with our mountains for
many years, going on for about sixty years, is we decided to
go to the high mountains and clear cut these natural forests
and replace them with commercial plantations of trees we
brought from Australia and the Northern Hemisphere. From
Australia we brought the eucalyptus--I'm saying ``we'' but
it's really the British--and from the North, we brought the
pine. These are trees that are used to temperate zones, both
in the South and the Northern Hemisphere. They did very well
because Kenya has highlands; Mount Kenya alone is 17,000 feet
above sea level. So these trees do very well. Also they were
growing on what was then virgin soil.
We literally sacrificed the natural forests in order to
expand these plantations. And sixty years down the road we
are beginning to see the negative impact of those
plantations. For one, we have lost a lot of biodiversity,
because these trees do not tolerate local biodiversity. They
kill everything except themselves. The other thing that has
happened is that once you remove the natural forest, you are
left with a forest that does not give you the same services
as the natural forest. For example, the tree plantations do
not retain rain water and encourage the water to go into the
underground reservoirs. Most of the water runs off downstream
and causes massive soil erosion and flooding and eventually
ends up in the lakes and seas.
With it, the water carries the topsoil that the farmer
needs to produce food. When you interfere too much with the
natural system, you will also interfere with the rainfall
patterns, because the nature of the forest controls the
climate and controls the rainfall patterns. So when you
change the ecology of the forest you also interfere with the
rain pattern. We're now experiencing either no rain or, when
the rains come, they come like a bucket from heaven has been
opened and it pours and causes massive soil erosion. The cash
crops, especially tea, do not like heavy rain. Tea prefers
soft, drizzling rain. So with the change in the way the rain
falls, you lose the crop yield.
How can you then have food security in a country like that,
where the farmers depend on rainfall or on water from
irrigation? It is impossible, and indeed at the beginning of
last month the Minister for Agriculture said
[[Page S7982]]
that about three million people in Kenya would need food aid
because the rainfall had declined so badly that farmers would
not have adequate yield.
Of course, the immediate response to the crisis is the
rainfall has not come. ``The rains did not come.'' But very
few of us ask, ``Why didn't the rains come?'' That's the
challenge. We need to ask ourselves, and that's why we're
being challenged to think holistically. For if we only want
the rains to come but don't want to understand why rains may
not come, then of course we're going to fail. I could have
told the Minister that because of the damage that we have
done to the mountains, to the five forested mountains in
Kenya, because of the illegal logging that has been going on
for years, charcoal burning that has been going on for years,
because of the commercial plantations that have been expanded
in the mountains and allowing literally thousands of people
to go into the forests and cultivate in order to support this
commercial plantation of timber, rainfall patterns sooner or
later would be affected.
Now some people say it is climate change and they say,
``Well, you know, even on Mount Kenya the glaciers are
receding.'' That's also quite possible. It's possible that it
is part of climate change. But climate change does not happen
at a global level at once. Climate change starts at a local
level. It is impacted by what we have done on these two
mountains. Multiply that several million times, because it is
happening in Kenya, it is happening in Africa, it is
happening in Europe, it's happening elsewhere. And sooner or
later, all these multiplied several million times create a
climate that in certain areas will become extremely harsh,
especially for people who don't have alternatives, such as
the people in our region.
In trying to solve the problem, the Minister will probably
say, ``We must go out and do two things: One, we must buy
food from those who have it, or we must seek food aid in the
world.'' I'm glad that United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) is represented here, because they are the
ones who are usually giving us food aid. That's a short-term
solution.
The long-term solution is for us to go back to the basics.
Go back to the basics and listen to what the Norwegian Nobel
Committee said: The environment is in an intricate way
joined, is related, is intertwined, in our lives on an
everyday basis. It is not something we think about or talk
about or learn about sometimes. The air we breathe, the water
we drink, the food we eat: Everything we do has to do with
the environment. We need to take this concept and make it
holistic, so that we can think in a holistic manner, and
learn to protect the base on which everything else depends.
Learn that if we destroy the mountain, the waters, when they
take the soil, they take away the soil in which the farmer
plants his seed.
If you ask an ordinary Kenyan woman why the rains do not
come, the farmer will probably say, ``God has not yet brought
the rain, and we must pray so that God brings us the rain.''
In recent years I have seen the need to talk to the religion
leaders and tell them that it is very important for them to
see the connection between the book of Genesis and what is
happening to the environment, and to begin to tell the
faithful that they must take care of the Garden of Eden that
God created in the book of Genesis, and to encourage them not
to wait for God to bring rain, because the rains will come
anyway.
But if the rains don't come, it has nothing to do with God.
It has everything to do with the way they are managing their
environment. So that that faithful [person], whether he can
read the Bible or not, or maybe at best can only read the
Bible in his own language, is motivated to go out, dig a
hole, and plant a tree. Or, is motivated to go and create a
terrace, or a trench, so that the next time the rains come,
they do not take away his topsoil, so that when he plants a
seed it will germinate because there is water in the ground
and the fertile topsoil has not been carried away. And he
will be motivated to support those terraces with trees, with
vegetation. As we [the Green Belt Movement] are doing now,
[perhaps] he is willing to even go further and plant trees on
public land, including going to the forest and planting trees
in the forest.
If the farmer does that, then those of us who are in a more
responsible position can make sure that what he plants, if
he's going to export, he will get fair trade. He'll get a
fair price. Most of these farmers that I'm talking about grow
tea and coffee. But when they grow this tea and coffee and
they send it to the international market, there are some
rules of the game--I don't know whether the food law
[program] looks at that--there are some rules of the game
that do not allow this farmer to get enough for his labor. He
gets very little from the international market, and he has no
control over that. When he needs inputs for his coffee and
tea he has to buy [them] at a price that has been set by
somebody else, and he has no control over that. Somehow there
is a law that does not create justice for this farmer, and as
a result, because he doesn't get enough for his labor, he
continues to scrape, to scratch this land and get very little
out of it. So we call him poor, and we begin to say that it
is partly because of his poverty that the environment is
being degraded.
Well, it is not true. The farmer is doing his best. He
needs to be assisted to learn that he has to protect his
environment. But those of us at this level also need to
protect his interests. So when he brings his produce to the
market he gets a fair price. That is why we are saying that
perhaps what many of these poor countries need so that they
may protect the environment is fair trade, support for aid so
that they can support that farmer, and they can protect that
forest, and they can encourage the rehabilitation of these
forests and these mountains so that the rivers can continue
to flow and the rains will come back.
The only way we can do that is if we have governments that
operate in a free, democratic space, so that they can
encourage their people, and governments that are promoting
cultures of peace, so that people can find a peaceful
environment in which to do these activities.
That is the message that I'm trying to share with you. I
believe that's the message the Norwegian Nobel Committee was
delivering to the world. It is the challenge that we have
been given, so that we can rethink what security and peace
really mean for us, and to understand that at no time, either
at the national level or at the regional level, can we have
peace if we do not think holistically--think from the top to
the bottom and as wide as we can.
If we do so, then we are prepared to capture tat image of
the traditional African stool with its three legs: Democracy,
peace, and sustainable management of our resources. Then we
can have a peaceful, secure base upon which development can
take place.
Thank you very much.
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