VII. EUROPE AND THE NORTH-SOUTH POLICY. THE INCREASING IMBALANCE BETWEEN THE RICH INDUSTRIALISED COUNTRIES AND THE POOR ONES. THE NEW HOLOCAUST CONTINUES CAUSED BY STARVATION, MISERY, UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND WAR. UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND THE PROBLEMS OF ENVIRONMENT.

ABSTRACT: In the seventh part of his report to the Radical Party Congress in Budapest, First Party Secretary Sergio Stanzani goes over the ground covered by the Radicals in their actions against extermination from hunger in the world and for affirming the right to life. The successes and failures of five-year campaign.

(The 35th Congress of the Radical Party, Budapest, April 22-26, 1989)

The Congress has asked us to revive the initiative against extermination in the Third World caused by hunger, underdevelopment and disease. It is a yearly massacre of millions and millions of human lives, victims of subhuman conditions and malnutrition, misery, unemployment and abandonment imposed on much of the population of the Third World. It is a massacre, a new holocaust which the ruling classes and governments of the Northern Hemisphere watch with indifference, as do the both the European Community and its member countries.

In our programme to put into effect the motion of the Bologna Congress which the Federal Council of Brussels (February 1988) had defined, we proposed and hoped to be able to contribute to the promotion and organisation of a second assembly of African Heads of State, which four years earlier had granted our request and that of the appeal contained in the Manifesto of the Nobel Prize Winners and had solemnly requested the European Community and the United Nations to approve programmes of emergency aid for resolving the problem of national debt, for immediately stopping and alleviating the food crisis in areas stricken with drought and famine, and in the medium term to remove their causes. The financial crisis that the party encountered a few months later in all its gravity unfortunately kept us from cultivating this project.

A combined feeling of defeat and impotence continues to weigh on us when we find ourselves facing this problem. Because today more topical than ever are the policy lines - definitively expressed in the manifesto-appeal signed by the majority of Nobel Prize winners throughout the world - which from 1979 to 1985 we have tried to actuate beginning with a mobilisation that called above all on Italy and the European Community.

The result of those campaigns and actions of ours was a strong increase in the funds made available by Italy and a continuing debate in the European Community. But what the Nobel winners had asked was still lacking: "a new political will manifestly and directly - with absolute priority - aimed at overcoming the causes of this tragedy and at immediately wiping out its effects". The will was lacking to choose and approve "new laws, new budgets, new programmes and new initiatives that would be immediately directed at saving billions of people from malnutrition and underdevelopment and hundreds of millions in each generation from death by starvation". Finally, the will was lacking to give "the status of law to saving the living, to not killing, to not exterminating, not even from inertia, not even by omission, not even from indifference" which had been solemnly demanded and affirmed in that manifesto-appeal.

Everything, as a consequence, returned to the political routine of "so-called development aid" that is more than anything else aid to the industries of the donor country and to their foreign trade, or which becomes aid that salves consciences at a cheap price and does not save those who take it".

Several recent events have shown us the way in which the great planetary ecological questions are woven together the problems of hunger and underdevelopment.

Thanks to the international association <> the problem of the Amazon has burst out - the most topical and critical one regarding deforestation. The environmentalists have spoken out in connecting the question of saving the Amazon and its equatorial forests with the question of the national debt that the poorest countries have accumulated over the years with the industrialised countries and which is suffocating their economies. But this connection has been taken for blackmail and stirred up nationalistic and "anti-imperialist" reactions. Certainly this reaction can be convenient for the great multinationals that exploit and destroy the Amazon and take their vital habitat away from the forest dwellers. But it reminds us that an environmental approach to these major questions is insufficient when it leaps over the serious and concrete problems of dealing with underdevelopment, hunger, unemployment, and the hopes of a great part of humanity. A similar kind of reasoning, as we have

seen, has been used by the Third World governments with regard to ozone. Ours cannot be the kind of cheap conscience-salving environmentalism which ignores or leaps over the problems of the Third World and is aligned with those who operate in the hope that the new environmental equilibrium will take place primarily at the expense again of the underdeveloped countries.

We can win the fight against deforestation and desertification, against the increasing use of energy and combustion if we can find a preventive answer to this problem. Today we have the scientific resources for finding this answer. But it will be necessary to overcome the split between power and knowledge.

The next ten years may constitute the last chance we have to manage these processes and dangers democratically. If we do not succeed in doing so, we will have new and ferocious candidates for military and totalitarian control. We will see the explosion of fear and insecurity. We will experience a frightful recrudescence of racism whose first admonitory signs are appearing everywhere in the world.