T172 Tma 5
...industrialised countries where they have been created, are transferred to developing countries, who then use them. It is sometimes in the form of aid, funded by international governmental organisations, focusing on specific aims such as projects or programmes, and other times a more generic process such as the passing on of knowledge and awareness of technology via educational programmes. It can also involve the setting up of commercial ventures which aid the development of the country in question. Yet its understanding remains somewhat unclear, when dealing with the previous point. It rests on dangerous assertions, and feeds the Western vision of itself as the fountain of technological wisdom: one fear of non industrialised governments is that Western environmental concerns will be used as a weapon to increase control over the economies of poor nations by forcing greater dependence on Western technologies. And it reinforces the aspirations of many governments of those poor nations to extort cash and other favours from the rich.
b) Under the umbrella of the Montreal Protocol signed by one hundred and fifty countries, a multilateral fund has been put in place administered by amongst others, the World Bank. It offers financial support for many technology transfer projects, one being the aim to reduce Chlorofluorocarbons such as in the replacement of CFC-based foam blowing machinery with new non-CFC equipment, and projects to initiate the recovery, recycling and reuse of CFC's during equipment servicing in the refrigeration and air conditioning sectors. An example, of this was the aim of the Thai government in eliminating CFC based refrigerators after 1996. Helped by Japanese based parent companies, local companies achieved this aim. The environmental benefits are that there has been a domino effect in that other countries have followed the lead established by...
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