A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 277In order to qualify for a loan, workers had to be registered employeeswho worked at least five days a month on the estate. 115 The loan addedanother layer of worker indebtedness to management. In this case, theindebtedness would last the five years that it would take the worker torepay the loan taken from the corporation. 116From workers’ point of view, the system only added to the company’scontrol over their lives. Historically, the only way that estateworkers have been able to get financing to improve their livingconditions has been through loans that keep them tied to the unfairlabour practices and dismal living conditions of estate life. Toupgrade their housing, for instance, workers have to take out loansfrom the Plantation Housing and Social Welfare Trust. One conditionof these loans is that ‘at least one family member of each familywill be required to work on the plantation during the 15-yearlease period’, 117 during which estate management takes monthly deductionsfrom wages. Hampered by low pay and perpetual indebtedness,workers find it difficult to move on and out of the estateeconomy.I see. And what’s the second problem?Inequality and social confl ict of many different kinds. First, as Neeyamakolaoffered solar-home systems primarily to estate workers, mostof whom are members of the Tamil ethnic minority, the nearby offgridvillagers of the Sinhalese majority felt discriminated against andmarginalised. Disgruntled youth from adjacent villages as well asfrom estate families who weren’t buying solar systems threw rocks atthe solar panels and otherwise tried to vandalise them.Second, local politicians and union leaders saw solar electricity as athreat to their power, since both groups use the promise of gettingthe local area connected to the conventional electricity grid as a wayof securing votes. So they started issuing threats to discourage prospectivebuyers.Third, the village communities living around the Vijaya estate fearedthat if too many people on the estate purchased solar systems, theCeylon Electricity Board would have a reason for not extending thegrid into their area. And without the grid, they felt, small-scale industryand other entrepreneurial activities, which would generateeconomic development and increase family income, would remainout of reach, making their social and economic disadvantages permanent.118 (Any delay in the extension of the grid to the area occasionedby the PacificCorp/SELCO Neeyamakola project, of course,would have its own effects on the use of carbon, and would have to