Snippets of Revelation

You will have noticed the trade deficit in goods of the United States with the rest of the world rising relentlessly month after month until it most recently has pushed up to just under $40 billion a month and is still climbing. And you will have heard the explanations that this was inevitably so in a Deregulated and Deglobalised world. Transnational corporations seek out the cheapest labour forces to �lick inflation� in the real economy, while speculative money is sucked in from all over because the prospects of Wall Street, though bad enough, are still a lot better than what exists in the rest of the world.

Life however, exposes the nonsensical reality such assurances cover up.

The latest is the story of the empty cargo containers that are transforming the landscape of key American ports and transport hubs (The Wall Street Journal 21/3, `That New High-Rise Blocking Your View May be a pile of Boxes� by Daniel Machalaba).

�South Kearny, NJ. - Amadeu Pereira sits behind his desk with a computer, a map of the US and photos of his family. Down the hall is a kitchen. Conference rooms take up the second floor.

�`It�s very comfortable here,� says Mr. Pereira, manager of Sea Box Inc. `You�d never know it was made up of cargo containers.�

Mr. Pereira built Sea Box�s two-storey office here from four of the company�s steel containers -two on the bottom and two on top. He put in windows and doors, installed wallboard and covered the structure with grey aluminum siding. He has turned other containers into garages, storage sheds, chicken coops, barns and even gun cabinets, selling them for as much as $40,000.

�No shortage of raw material for Mr. Pereirds handiwork. So many empty containers are piling up near ports and transport hubs around the country that the stacks often resemble large buildings. Shipping officials estimate that as many as 500,000 empty containers, each the size of a truck trailer, are sitting in the US - about double the figure a couple of years ago.

�Blame the trade deficit that has caused much more freight to enter the US a than to be shipped out of it. Owners of ocean vessels have found it much easier to acquire containers in the Far East and let the empty ones accumulate here, rather than send the

empties back to Asia. That can cost some $4,000.� Around ports like Charleston, S.C., containers have become an eyesore. Chicago complains that it has about 20 container yards it knows about. In Newark, N.J. Palmer Industries, Inc. has piled up thousands of empty containers in multistoreyed stacks painted a variety of colours that look like condominiums out on the town.

From a mere nuisance the containers have become symbol of the world�s globalised madness. Perhaps with the world headed into recession they can be organised as cities for America�s homeless to bring matters into better balance.

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Once upon a time in a lush, green country, criss-crossed with swift-flowing rivers, thousands of poor people were dying every year from drinking unclean water at monsoon time. Then a fairy godmother came along and, waving her intermediate-technological wand promised: Sink these shallow tubewells and your diarrheal illnesses will go away.� And the fairy godmother and her friends helped the government of the country to sink the tubewells and the people got better. But they all lived happily only for a short time after.

To understand what Bangladesh was like in the pre-tubewell era, you need to take a walk around a village with its elders. They will tell you of the former beauty of their surroundings -where the ponds were, which were for washing and bathing, and which were reserved for drinking. They will show you the half dozen village wells and the homes that were occupied by families whose traditional job was to manage the village water and ensure year-around availability. You will also see the many tubewells and hear how they were at first disliked because they were messy and lessened the social contact brought about by shared water-gathering. Acceptance at village level only came when the benefits of the new clean water supply were understood, thanks to the expensive aid-funded awareness campaigns of the 1970s.

Most tubewells were sunk after aid agencies flooded into Bangladesh in the 1970s. Led by UNICEF and the Government, millions were installed in the belief that this was the way to achieve safe water for everyone.