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Good afternoon. My name is Stephen Mills and I am the Human Rights and 

 Environment Campaign Director for the Sierra Club. I appreciate the opportunity to 

 present to the Committee the observations of the Sierra Club's International Program on 

 the issues we believe pertinent to Africa's environmental future. I will concentrate my 

 remarks today on West Africa, particularly on Nigeria, and the issue there on which the 

 Sierra Club is currently most active. I will summarize my testimony but ask that the full 

 text be submitted for the record. 



This afternoon I would like to discuss, in part, the role that the multinational oil 

 company Shell has played in Nigeria, and their collusive relationship with a brutal 

 military dictatorship. I believe that this case provides a good example of the challenges 

 faced by Africans across the continent as they strive to develop and manage their natural 

 resources. It is also the story of a heinous double-standard utilized by of one of the 

 world's most recognized multinational corporations. The Sierra Club aims to hold Shell 

 up as an example of how development should not occur in Africa. I will close with some 

 recommendations for preventing future Nigerian tragedies. 



Madam Chairman, in February of 1994, in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled, 

 'The Coming Anarchy," Robert Kaplan wrote that the cities of West Africa at night are 

 some of the unsafest places in the world. He wrote that West Africa is becoming the 

 symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal 

 anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. 



The intention of his article was to stimulate readers to understand "the 

 environment" for what it is: the national security-issue of the early twenty-first century. 

 "The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, 

 deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and rising sea levels in 

 critical overcrowded regions," he said, "will be the core foreign-policy challenge from 

 which most others will ultimately emanate." 



For example, Kaplan noted that when Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 

 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. 

 In the Ivory Coast the proportion of forest has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. 

 The deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more \ 

 mosquitos. As a result, it has been reported that virtually everyone in the West African 

 interior now has some form of malaria. 



Kaplan said that to mention "the enviroimaent" or "diminishing natural resources" 

 in foreign-policy circles was to meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To make 

 matters worse, there are those who even beUeve that what Africa really needs in order to 

 help give it an economic boost is in fact more pollution. In a January 14, 1992 internal 

 memo to World Bank chiefs, economist Lawrence Summers wrote, "I've always's thought 

 that the underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted...just between you 

 and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries 



