[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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