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“The legislation on sustainability that the European Union is adopting is a sign of the failure of the private sector, which has not known how to regulate itself,” said Ester Xicota, a Spanish sustainability expert and consultant based in Lima. “In terms of sustainability, governments are essential, they are the ones that have come later, but in the end they are the ones that manage public resources. Because if you put restrictions in place, it’s simple: you have to comply with them,” she points out.
Xicota is referring to environmental regulations that are coming into force, such as the Directive on Corporate Due Diligence in Sustainability approved on April 24 by the European Parliament, which requires industries in these countries to take responsibility for the environmental and social impact of their production chain. In other words, a company in Europe can protect labor rights and regulate its emissions, but if a large percentage of the inputs for its production come from a country where labor rights are not monitored and emissions are not restricted, then indirectly that company is not sustainable.
“Due diligence requires companies to look at their value chain, to break the veil that has always separated them from their suppliers, and to identify the social and environmental impacts that exist, so that they can begin to resolve them. It is a basic obligation: to start considering the chain as part of their business,” explains Ester Xicota.
Faced with a whirlwind of regulations that will become increasingly demanding, the expert, based on her experience in Latin America, urges the governments of the region to examine the path to follow in relation to these regulatory frameworks. Otherwise, she warns, “we will end up, as always, complying with regulations designed and created in Europe to legislate completely different territories and realities.”
Their fears are not far from a reality that is already looming. At the end of 2024, a directive will come into force stating that no agricultural exports from Latin America to Europe linked to palm oil, cocoa, coffee, rubber, cattle, wood and soy, as well as their derivatives, such as beef, leather products, printed paper, furniture, cosmetics or chocolate can be linked to forest degradation. In addition, the products must have a certificate proving that no trees have been cut down to carry out that production. This resolution already caused discontent in May of last year in the Brazilian government, which, under President Lula da Silva, described it as “unilateral actions” contrary to free trade and the spirit of agreements such as the long-delayed one between Mercosur and the EU.
“What has happened historically, as a remnant of colonialism, is that Latin America has always been the place for extraction and the place to dump waste. Now the countries of the global North are turning around and telling us that we are doing it wrong, but what they don’t say is that this is what they have demanded of us for decades,” explains Professor Diana Gómez García, from the University of the Andes in Colombia, an expert in the development of critical knowledge on sustainability. “So what we have here is a lack of agency. We are always like the child in the park who does whatever it takes to be invited to play and we always enter the game at a disadvantage. We have to think about where we are situated, to propose that from here it can be done differently.”
For Xicota, Latin America urgently needs to start thinking as a block, to create strategic alliances that give more weight to the positions that countries take on the management of their natural resources and their working capital. “What happens with the countries of the global South is that if one of them says: ‘These are my resources and I am going to protect them’, then the companies and governments go with the country on their side and so on until they find someone who will give them their conditions, so when they are not aligned it is very difficult to compete. Common fronts should be created so as not to put all social and working capital at risk. Africa is already doing this,” he insists.
The academic Gómez also shares this desire to think as a block, but she does not lose sight of the fact that it would be an option that would not suit the countries of the North as much. “When we are fragmented, it is easier to pull the strings, and there is also the ghost of social communism. Thinking of ourselves as a block, as the European Union does, would mean thinking of ourselves from the agency, from the epistemology of the South, from other ways that understand, for example, that neoliberal capitalism has to be revised and that exponential growth is unviable. But the world is not ready for that,” she affirms.
For now, the Colombian expert proposes that States set clear limits and conditions. “The circularity that they sell us from Europe seems fantastic, but when you transfer it to the social sphere, it raises complex questions. What is the workforce that is going to dismantle the clothes or disassemble the cell phone to reuse the pieces?” Probably, she answers, precarious and cheap labor. “As Latin American countries we have to tell them: ‘We fit into your idea of circularity, but here decent salaries are paid, people are trained, here there is an infrastructure that includes innovation and design.”
From Mexico, Néstor Genis, Coordinator of Inclusion and Sustainable Development of the organization Ethosalso resents the fact that Latin America does not have a common vision. With the changes of government in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, he explains, there are also radical changes in the agenda that prevent a unified view. In Mexico, he adds, the environmental issue has not been a priority in recent years. “In addition, we have a tension between legislation versus implementation: because we have our own regulations, but they are not implemented and they are not sufficient.”
According to Genis, the real counterweight in environmental matters in Latin America has been provided by civil society organizations and the community. “They are the ones who have pointed out the looting, set limits and defended the territory with their lives, because regulation and management from the State have not been sufficient.”
According to Gómez, an expert in the development of critical knowledge on sustainability, thinking about proposing environmental regulations from Latin America makes experts invoke other types of scenarios. “What if we think about relationships instead of transactions? What if we regenerate systems and create narratives that do not seek exponential growth?” she asks. The Colombian proposes thinking about the work of the State also from the popular perspective and cites an example from the capital of her country, Bogotá, to understand it. “Today they sell us the idea of relationships instead of transactions? What if we regenerate systems and create narratives that do not seek exponential growth?” second hand [ropa de segunda mano]when in Colombia, in Plaza España, the working classes have been exchanging clothes for decades,” he says. “There are popular revolutions that are happening, but they were invisible or were marked with the label of poverty. It is time to see how the State begins to legislate with its citizens beyond the norm,” he concludes.
Precisely in order not to leave all the work in the hands of governments, Xicota advocates strengthening Latin American civil society and invites consumers to be vigilant about regulations and
future prohibitions. “Ecofascism is lurking,” he says. If the priority is to save the human species, it will be done with or without democracy. Heavy-handed regulations can be very effective, but they do not tend to be very fair.”
He also urges us to make consumption a political act, to consume less and to have a little imagination: “The biggest crisis we have is one of imagination. We cannot think only about the laws of the market. We have to stand up and innovate and challenge the laws of the market, which are not natural laws.”
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