The Hypocrisy of Green Colonialism

How Western Activists are Recruiting Indigenous Populations and the Developing World in their Fight Against Development

In Europe and the United States, activists leading the left, socialist, environmentalist movements regularly campaign against industry, innovation, trade and development, defining them as capitalist attempts to colonize the developing world for profit and plunder. They often use the neo-colonialism charge to advance their degrowth, green post-capitalist agenda.

But look more closely and you will find these activists trying to advance their campaigns by exploiting (colonizing) these same “victims” while pretending to speak on their behalf. This green colonialism is not only hypocritical, it is also further subjugating and depriving underdeveloped nations, indigenous people and democratic governments in the pursuit of some Western left-wing, environmental policy agenda.

Some examples.

The “Indigenous” Campaign Against Salmon Aquaculture

The Firebreak has been monitoring how foundations have been funding NGOs or setting up fiscal sponsors and supporting media groups to report on anti-aquaculture campaigns, mainly farmed salmon operations in Chile, Australia and British Columbia. These philanthropist-fed campaigns have been trying to incentivize and recruit indigenous populations and First Nations to speak on their behalf. But if these local populations are being fed activist dogma with a small emolument to entice them, are the Western activists really acting on their behalf?

In a recent Firebreak exposé, Juan Carlos Tonko Paterito of the Kawésqar Indigenous Community in Puerto Edén, Chile was quoted as saying:

“We have seen how imperialists show their tentacles in our territories. Now its form is more surreptitious and typical of our time. It is no longer about putting the boot on top, but about meddling in the communities, creating some [indigenous people] on demand, acclimatizing them and, then, beating the cloths through social networks and … media to legitimize them as the only and authentic [indigenous people] because they are friends of the settler. … The new Yanaconas are now digital and globalized by the hand of the green colonialists … It cannot be that we are at the mercy of organizations of which we know little or nothing about their interests and for which Chilean citizens have not voted to govern our destinies as they are doing … Today we demand that the Government of Chile set its territorial policy in Magallanes, not that it be dictated by these organizations and their local allies.” Original text

Green colonialism is an apt term to capture the self-interest of the activist groups in using people or nations to advance their interests.

Rather than neo-colonialism, this activist-driven subjugation should be called neon-colonialism as they are using this exploitation in an attempt to shine their campaigns brightly for all to see. But such neon lights are harsh to the eyes and lacking in authentic illumination (why most of these activists have been blind to the hypocrisy of their own abusive exploitation). They tell the supposed victims they are being protected, liberated or defended, but in the end these populations are left with flashy promises broadcast for all to see and little more. No jobs, no financial support, no future.

The western foundations, fiscal sponsors and their sub-contracted activists and media groups are working out of a tried and tested playbook. In British Columbia, Canada, anti-salmon farming activists even injected some star-power with a billionaire-endowed NGO recruiting Leonardo DiCaprio to speak nobly on behalf of the downtrodden First Nations. The tribe struck back though, claiming Leo should either meet them to learn how they fish, to watch what he says, or go back to Hollywood.

“Organizations like Wild First Canada pull activists and the public in with misinformation and get big names to stand behind them, with zero accountability for how this could devastate the progress Indigenous Peoples have made to attain food affordability, job security, and independence as a nation.” Source

In British Columbia alone, 17 First Nations have formal agreements with salmon farming companies generating $51 million in annual revenue for these indigenous tribes. It is easy to understand why they don’t take kindly to green colonialists speaking on their behalf while interfering with their livelihoods.

Greenpeace

If there were ever awards for green colonialism, Greenpeace International would be the widely-fêted laureate. Their failed attempt to stop the construction of an oil pipeline at Standing Rock was textbook exploitation of an indigenous population fed lies and hollow promises of some better world if they just helped the NGO fill out the ranks and frame their policy struggle as a battle for the survival of an indigenous population too often victimized, first by the white man, then by the capitalist (same thing). Greenpeace tried to claim they were only passively involved at the demonstration battleground, but the courts ruled otherwise. In the end, when the protest flares cleared, all that was left was an enormous amount of uncollected trash (and a lost lawsuit).

When the board selected Kumi Nadoo to be the Greenpeace International executive director in 2009, the goal was to broaden the anti-capitalist militant group’s sphere of influence to the South, developing and vulnerable countries (not your typical Greenpeace champagne socialist crowd of affluent virtue signalers). Funds were reallocated from wealthy western donors to campaigns to stop peasant farmers in developing countries from benefitting from Golden Rice and BT brinjal.

The 2012 Greenpeace International Annual Report shows €45.3 million spent for “organisational support” of Greenpeace offices in developing countries for “capacity boosting initiatives in the Global South” (an increase of 21% from 2011). It would be hard to find many corporations with similar budgets for communications and lobbying campaigns in developing countries. See my assessment of this strategy back in 2013.

Needless to say, this neo-colonialist strategy failed and further maligned Greenpeace’s reputation (and did little for Kumi the Conqueror’s career prospects as he left the NGO nearly bankrupt).

WHO Policy Piracy

Affluent health ambitions cannot easily be imposed on non-affluent nations unless you work at the WHO in Geneva. At which point, it seems quite normal for these transnational diplomats, working in programs funded to a large part by philanthropist billionaires, to decide that developing nations lack the regulatory capacity to determine their own policies. It should come as no surprise that the WHO imposes such pressure when governments go against the political interests drafted by WHO-affiliated interest groups.

Take for example the WHO’s strict anti-nicotine position and their mystifying campaign against tobacco harm reduction alternatives (eg, vaping and nicotine pouches). Harry Shapiro demonstrated how the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has been pressuring low- and middle-income countries like the Philippines to just ban all safer nicotine products. Shapiro shows how the WHO is using “a tangled inter-dependent web of grantees, sub-grantees, associates and partners including the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative stretching across the world” and funded by billionaire philanthropies, to put pressure on governments should they favor tobacco harm reduction strategies instead.

NGOs with colonial ambitions have moved to tighten their relationships within UN bodies to increase government pressure at the global scale. The hundreds of UN high-level conferences, negotiations, forums, assemblies and framework programs create a platform for NGOs, foundations, civil society groups to broadcast their agenda without much dialogue and pressure governments from a global bully pulpit. The UNFCCC Climate COPs, the WHO High-Level Non-Communicable Disease Conferences or the UNEP Plastics Pollution negotiations are such examples.

But if NGOs really want to influence policy processes and impose their policies on governments, then it is better to work from within the institutions via foundations that are funding UN programs. The FCTC is a good example of a tool where anti-smoking activist groups are able to interfere with national tobacco harm reduction strategies to stop non-tobacco alternatives. But nothing spells neo-colonialism more than the Agroecology Fund splashing millions of dollars on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to run a program that ensures peasant farmers in developing countries are denied agricultural technologies to help ease their burden.

Ironic how the agroecologists argue that it is the deep pockets of the ag-tech industry that is leading the new colonization in Africa.

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Is industry then the new colonizer holding back progress, exploiting populations and imposing foreign systems on developing countries and indigenous populations? Is capitalism merely neo-colonialism in a far more brutal form than the previous imperial waves of enslavement and socio-economic destruction? Or are we dealing with a world of competing colonizers?

One thing is certain: green colonialism is synonymous with activist hypocrisy.