Made on Earth Read online

  Contents

  1 How a Fleece Became the Star

  2 Can Money Really Buy Everything?

  3 Oil Tankers: The Whipping Boys of Globalisation

  4 A General Strike in Chittagong: Bangladesh Hangs By a Thread

  5 Tuk-tuk Races, Floods and Fleece: A Day in Bangladesh’s Textile Industry

  6 A World of Floating Metal Boxes: A Container Ship Heading for Europe

  7 From Surplus to Talisman: Something Unwanted Becomes a Lucky Charm

  8 The Fishing Industry and People Trafficking: A Journey to West Africa

  9 Some are Thirsty, Others are Not: A Showdown in Tenerife

  10 How We Could Change the End of This Story Together

  About the Author

  Glossary

  Further Information

  1

  How a Fleece Became the Star

  It was not love at first sight, no way! Bright red fleeces are for young girls, or Liverpool FC fans. They are definitely not for tough journalists. When I first saw the fleece, hanging there in the department store, I immediately knew it wasn’t for me. I wanted a brown one, though a green one would have been okay, or even blue. But they only had my size in red.

  It was late autumn, 2005, and I didn’t have the time to look in many shops. I was bogged down in the final phase of writing a book, and I hadn’t yet received an advance from my publisher, so I didn’t have the money to buy a decent jacket. Winter was approaching, and I was stuck in my office working on the manuscript for eight to ten hours a day. If I didn’t want to freeze to my chair, something had to be done.

  Two shops and one special offer later, I was the new owner of a bright red fleece. I’d never have guessed that one day I’d write an entire book dedicated to this item of clothing. So how did it come about? Well, in 2007 my publishers wanted me to write a book about globalisation, and although I had had an idea for a long time, I didn’t have a main character. To keep them happy, I told them I would come up with a protagonist by Christmas. A character that would take us around the world at breakneck speed, through Asia, Europe and Africa, travelling on ships and sailing across oceans.

  Without realising, the days had slipped past and it was already the 21st of December. I needed to come up with a character, and fast! The next day, I hosted an audition to find a star for my book. But the contestants weren’t singers or dancers. They were the kind of products that make our lives more convenient and interesting, for example: toasters, computers, MP3 players, vacuum cleaners, bread makers and televisions.

  Products like these have done a lot of travelling. But how can we find out where they’ve been? Their first official destination is the country where they were made. This information can usually be found somewhere on the product, on a sticker, label or stamp. Take my toaster, for example. Where is it from? Hong Kong. My alarm clock? From China. Where did my computer come from? It says, ‘Assembled in Taiwan’. Many books written in English are made abroad. My atlas was printed in Slovenia. What about my kettle? This is an exception. It says, ‘Made in Germany’, which is pretty rare these days! So rare in fact, that the manufacturers have made a big deal about it. However, the country where a product was made is only one step in its life story. Each product’s journey starts with the sourcing of raw materials, and inevitably ends with the product being recycled or turned into landfill.

  But for now, back to the audition. I had lined up a few interesting products and had already picked a favourite, my laptop. It had an American brand name on it, the processor was made in Germany, and the whole thing was assembled in Taiwan. It sounded like it had been on a very interesting journey. But I really wanted to tell the whole story of a product, from sourcing the raw materials to disposal and recycling. If I chose something made out of so many individual parts, I would have too many materials to trace. That would be difficult and time-consuming, and probably boring to read. I needed a different lead for my story. But what?

  The next day I was sat in the living room in front of the television. Every year at Christmas, there are lots of news stories about people in need, from the homeless and people who are financially disadvantaged to refugees. One particular story was about African refugees trying to escape to the Canary Islands. Over 60 people were squeezed inside a tiny boat for ten days in the wind and the rain, without any drinking water. Dramatic footage had been recorded by a tourist on camera. The refugees lay on the beach together. There was a quick close-up of a boy wearing a bright red fleece. A red fleece! It was as if a gong had sounded in my head. Was that my bright red fleece? I was sure I had put that exact same fleece in a clothes-recycling bin where I live just a few months ago. The clothes from that bin, I had just found out, had been sent to West Africa to be sold.

  Watching the TV, I thought I recognised a stain I had made on the left hand side of the fleece. Or was it the right? The footage was too poor to tell. I could barely concentrate for the rest of the day. Had that been my fleece? Could that have been the same item of clothing I had once owned?

  “Do you really believe that it was yours?” asked my girlfriend.

  “I’ve no idea,” I admitted.

  “Those kinds of fleece body warmers are mass-produced.”

  “Yes, of course,” I replied. “I don’t know whether it really was my fleece. I have no way to tell it apart from others except by the big stain on the front. Do you want me to pick it out of a line-up?”

  “You don’t actually want to fly to Tenerife to visit a refugee camp to find a refugee and see if there is a stain on his fleece, do you?” she asked.

  “I’m not that stupid. Anyway, I currently lack the necessary funds.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” she replied. “Those people have barely escaped death and you’re looking for an old fleece!”

  I didn’t really want to know whether that specific fleece the young refugee was wearing was mine. The fact that it could have been mine was more important. After seeing the young man in the red fleece on television, I didn’t need to think about what to use as the focus for my book any more. This was much better than a laptop or an alarm clock. The tale of my globe-trotting red fleece would be the perfect way to explain how everything is interconnected.

  How did a young man in Africa end up wearing a red fleece that was recycled in Europe? Where was the fleece made? Where did the raw materials come from? Why do people from poorer countries leave their villages to try to get to richer countries? And why are some countries so poor and others so rich in the first place? The answer is . . . globalisation.

  Examples of Globalisation

  Seventy per cent of all cigarette lighters are produced in a single province in China called Wenzhou and then shipped around the world.

  When people in America order a tuna fish pizza with extra cheese (or any pizza for that matter) from a local pizza company over the telephone, the order goes through a call centre in India and is then directed through the Internet to the local takeaway in the USA.

  Crabs caught in the North Sea are frozen immediately. They then travel by truck through Europe and across the Mediterranean Sea to Morocco (North Africa). The crabs are then processed and brought back to Europe.

  This may seem crazy to you, but this is how crab sellers in Europe, pizza companies in America and cigarette lighter sellers all over the world save a lot of money. On top of this, the minimum wage in less developed countries is not even a tenth of the minimum wage in industrialised (more developed) countries.

  The term ‘globalisation’ comes from the word ‘globe’ – a spherical ball that represents planet Earth. In 1983, the American science professor Theodore Levitt tried to find a word to describe how all of the economic activity on the entire planet was connected. Never before had so many people exchange
d so many things across the world. Not just objects but also ideas, fashion, music – and above all, money. No one was truly isolated from these exchanges, not even rural farmers in the most remote parts of Africa. What we choose to produce and sell has consequences for everyone on this planet. Industry is no longer contained within a town, a city or a country, but also spread across the whole globe. This is how ‘globalisation’ got its name.

  24 December 2007

  While everyone celebrated around the Christmas tree, I sat at my computer and opened a new document. I tried to remember everything I could about my fleece. The first thing that came to mind was its rich, bright red colour. It was made of a fluffy, warm material, as soft as a rabbit’s fur. However fleece fabric is not actually made from natural materials, such as cotton, silk or wool. Fleece fabric is actually made of artificial fibres made from polyethylene – a kind of plastic. And how do we make plastic? Out of petroleum. So where does the story of my fleece really begin? It begins with an order . . .

  10 May 2005

  The head office of a chain of German department stores is situated near a motorway on the outskirts of Gütersloh, Germany. While the spring sun shines outside, a storm rages in the meeting room. The ordering period for the next season’s stock is a stressful time for everyone who works there.

  The head of purchasing, Mr Werner Wittkowski, and the new head of marketing, Ms Elfriede Unruh enter the meeting room. They are not getting on well. Mr Wittkowski doesn’t want to make any big changes to the purchasing plan, but Ms Unruh wants to shake things up. On the table in front of them is a range of seasonal clothing. There are winter coats made from various materials, heavy denim trousers, woollen knit and polyester jumpers, overcoats and sleeveless body warmers made of corduroy and fleece. There are also piles of clothing brochures advertising hundreds of other garments. Many of the clothing descriptions are written in broken English as most of them come from China and the Far East.

  Chinese clothing manufacturers have been flooding European wholesalers and retailers with products that are cheaper than their competitors in Bulgaria, Bangladesh and Turkey for some time. At this particular chain of department stores, many orders for shoes, skiwear and tailored shirts have already been awarded to Chinese manufacturers based on the low prices of their products.

  “Next up we have the fleece items,” says the director of the company.

  Mr Wittkowski hits the brakes on ordering stock from China. “We’ve always ordered our stock from BGI (Bangladesh Garni International) in Bangladesh. Their prices are fair, and the products are good quality.”

  “At the end of the day, quality in this business is not important,” interrupts Ms Unruh. “Our customers don’t care whether their clothes last five years or one winter. They care about fashion. There is only one trend in the textile industry, cheap, cheaper, cheapest. The Chinese manufacturers can make clothes that look as good as named brand products, which are also dirt cheap.”

  “But we have always ordered our stock from Bangladesh!” protests Mr Whittkowski. “Don’t we have a certain obligation to them?”

  “No! We can order stock from wherever we like,” replies Ms Unruh.

  “We have an obligation to our shareholders,” the director interrupts. “They want to see growth.”

  “But what about our customers?” says Mr Wittkowski. “They want a fair price for good quality products. Will the Chinese company keep to the shipping schedules and delivery dates? Will the quality of the stock be consistent and of a high level? Will they use non-toxic dyes? BGI have consistently delivered high quality products at reasonable prices for the past thirteen years.”

  “That settles it then,” replies the director, who has the final say in the matter. “This year, we will continue to order our fleece products from Bangladesh.”

  The director’s PA sends out the orders after lunch. They are signed off by both Mr Wittkowski and Ms Unruh before they are faxed directly to China and Bangladesh. Included in the final order are 1,000 fleece body warmers, made of 100 per cent fleece fabric, with a central zip fastening and pockets, to be supplied in a range of colours including green, blue, grey and brown. Strangely, it seems that bright red fleeces aren’t on the list.

  2

  Can Money Really Buy Everything?

  11 August 2005

  It’s night, and the crude oil that will one day become my fleece is here. But where are we exactly? We are at sea, but close to the coast. Even though it is late in the evening, there is a warm breeze across the water. Around us are burning towers that look like huge, fiery Christmas trees poking up out of the sea. These are platforms where crude oil is drilled for 24 hours a day. The light from the flare stacks can be seen for miles and miles around.

  The oil fields here are different to those on land (like in Siberia), and in the north (off the coast of Norway, for example). They are also different to those in Sudan and South America, near Venezuela. These are the oil fields of the Middle East. Here, the land glows like a huge fairground. Aeroplane passengers twist and turn in their seats so they can look down on the bright lights from 10,000 metres above. Many of them will spot a huge spit of land, shaped like an encircled palm tree sticking out of the coast. This man-made island is unmistakable. We are in the Persian Gulf in the sheikhdom of Dubai. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a country made up of seven individual sheikhdoms that have become super-rich through selling oil. The burning flares and glowing city lights shine all day, every day. When you have a seemingly endless supply of natural gas and crude oil, you don’t have to worry about your gas and electricity bills.

  20 August 2004

  It is early in the morning. A drill stands on an oil platform off the coast of Dubai, ready to burrow into a huge underground reservoir of petroleum. The thick black oil explodes up into the sky the moment the drill breaks through the final tightly sealed layer of rock. Over a period of approximately 150 million years, vast amounts of gas have been compressed under immense pressure, resulting in the formation of oil. In the past, oil prospectors would unleash huge fountains of oil that would sometimes catch fire. These days, the oil is safely piped away, day in and day out.

  But how is crude oil created? To find out we must go back in time, to between 200 and 900 million years ago. At this point in history, there was only one vast sea, known as the primal ocean, and all the continents were still part of a single connected landmass. Around part of this landmass was an area where the seabed was flat, which we refer to today as the Wadden Sea. It’s here that life on Earth began. The first living organisms were blue-green algae; followed by tiny jellyfish-like creatures, the first forms of coral, and echinoderms – the forerunners of sea urchins and starfish.

  As the Earth’s mantle (the planet’s rocky outer shell) wasn’t as solid as it is today, it could still move around. Over time, increasingly large cracks called basins appeared in the ocean floor. In these basins lived vast amounts of sea creatures that sank to the bottom when they died. There were so many of them that they couldn’t all be eaten by other creatures or destroyed by bacteria. Without oxygen they could not rot. Instead they turned the ocean floor into a black marshy expanse. Over thousands and thousands of years, sand and rocks settled on top of this gooey mass. As the dead matter became trapped from all sides, immense pressure built up, which also generated heat. This combination of extreme heat and intense pressure helped to turn the dead organisms into natural gas and crude oil.

  Even today, the finer details of how petroleum is created are only just beginning to be understood. In spite of this, for modern humans petroleum is a miracle substance, a form of almost pure energy. If nature hadn’t created huge amounts of oil, natural gas and coal millions of years ago, we’d probably all still be travelling by horse and cart and using sailing boats to cross the oceans. Globalisation, as we know it, would not exist. However, these natural energy resources are not equally distributed across the globe. Some countries have very few fossil fuel resources, or none at al
l, while other countries, like the United Arab Emirates, have vast supplies of fossil fuels such as petroleum.

  11 August 2005

  Back to the 11 August 2005. The petroleum has been found, drilled for, and pumped out of the ground. Several oil tankers have moored close to the oil platform off the coast of Dubai to collect the oil, including the 187 metre long Madras. However, the petroleum is not immediately pumped into the waiting tankers, but runs through a pipeline on the seabed to a storage container on land. At this stage the thick black liquid is a mixture of oil, gas, saltwater and other impurities. It is not yet ready to be transported and sold as it contains too many extra worthless materials.

  Once on land, the mixture is moved to a container to be pressurised. The natural gas is extracted and filtered off, which is then used to run Dubai’s huge power stations. In another tank the heavy saltwater sinks to the bottom and is pumped away. Using heat, electricity and chemical reactions, the remainder of the water and other waste products are removed. The resulting pure crude oil is now ready to be transported by tankers or through pipelines.

  Most tankers drop anchor off-shore while they are waiting for an oil pick-up. The wait can last for several weeks, however the Madras only has to wait for 72 hours. In the mornings and evenings when the air is cooler, Captain van der Valt stands on the bridge of the Madras watching the coastline through his binoculars for hours on end. Every time he sails to Dubai, he feels like he’s arrived on the set of a science-fiction film. The top floors of the skyscrapers glow blue and look like giant, alien heads. Other constructions look like docking stations for missiles, although in reality they are brightly lit building sites surrounded by cranes, the birthplaces of future skyscrapers.