The Beginning of the
Tony Wardle tries to make sense of a global crisis and finds that rejecting animal products is now central to the survival of a planet facing economic and environmental collapse
When I was a kid I sailed as a midshipman on a dirty old cargo vessel plying the West African coast. Outward bound we carried general cargo – anything from light bulbs to Land Rovers. Homeward bound we brought back just two cargos, cocoa beans and ‘logs’- five- ton sections of rainforest tree trunks. The word environment hadn’t been
invented back then but there were countless siren voices warning against the dangers of stripping colonial countries of their natural resources and exploiting their farmers. In a good season, Ghanaian cocoa farmers made enough money to feed their children: in a bad season they starved. But in the privileged, leafy avenues of Esher and Weybridge, City
32 viva!life
cocoa dealers lived and parked their BMWs, sent their children to public school yet produced not a single cocoa bean. Their luxury lifestyles were unaffected by West Africa’s seasons or the despair of those upon whose backs they stood. And nothing has changed. It is their ilk and the banks which fund them who we can thank for the current state of the world. I was in Takoradi on the Gold Coast when
it gained independence from Britain and became Ghana. On that night in 1957, the man who lead the fight against our brutal colonial domination was Kwame Nkruma and people wept in the streets as they waited for their hero to transform their impoverished lives. He didn’t – couldn’t – because Britain still owned Ghana’s
Endgame
economy and powerful bodies such as the United Africa Company (Unilever) maintained a stranglehold over it. So, very early in life, I witnessed the two
dominant strands of Western philosophy at work – environmental exploitation and market forces. Both have been allowed an almost completely free run in the half century since then and for Ghana, the result has been the complete annihilation of its forests while cocoa farmers are still teetering on the edge of survival, often using child slave labour simply to survive. Market forces have been indulged like a
fat, bloated, bullying child. And the more he’s been given, the more he’s demanded. Even now, as the pillars of our financial temples crack and groan under the strain
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