http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
How can the west stop poor nations being exploited for their natural wealth?
Imagine a small nation, undeveloped yet fantastically rich in a natural resource that offers it a one-off chance of great wealth. An aggressive, sophisticated foreign power wants that commodity and is prepared to do anything it can – diplomatic or military – to get it. What hope does the nation have? You wonder if Paul Collier’s new book has been timed as a tie-in with the DVD of Avatar, the story of a gentle planet that suffers “resource curse”.
Extractables are a curse: no poor nation in modern times (except, perhaps, Malaysia and Botswana) has prospered as a result of them. Many, from Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of Congo, have been repeatedly ravished over decades because of the wealth under their soil. And the reversal of this rule provides Collier’s central question: how are we to redirect the whole sorry story of mankind’s inequitable and short-sighted plundering of the planet’s resources?
Policymakers in development love Collier, because he offers routes out of ideological thickets. Now a professor of economics at Oxford, he emerged from the World Bank, where he was director of research, to publish perhaps the most highly regarded – and certainly the most read – book on global poverty and its possible solutions of the last decade. The success of The Bottom Billion (2007) owed a lot to the fact that it took a middle way between the doctrines of the right and the left over development. Collier’s practical solutions offered a remarkable change from the one-size-fits-all doctrines of liberalisation that had driven 20 years of development.
The Bottom Billion’s subtitle was “Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it.” The Plundered Planet has one that promises even more: “How to reconcile prosperity with nature”. It’s a big sell, given that many people think that is already too late. The planet has too many people, and too many resources have been taken for such a proposition to be anything other than a theoretical exercise.
But Collier is an optimist and, for a political economist, unusually humane. In The Plundered Planet he again plays peacemaker between the ideologues. On the one side are the “ostriches”, who are sceptical about climate change and see the continuing exploitation of the planet’s natural assets as both necessary and our right. On the other side are the “romantics”, who are determined that the human race should change its lifestyle and make amends to the future for having despoiled and overheated the planet. Each are half-right, Collier says, but adds: “Run by the romantics the world would starve, run by the ostriches it would burn.”
Much of the book is taken up by a careful quest to establish absolutes. What should be the principles of ownership over the world’s common goods – those whose importance or geography transcends borders, like the Amazon rain forest, the Arctic oil fields or ocean fish stocks? And do we have a duty to conserve these resources for those who will use the planet after us?
Current principles of national ownership, Collier argues, do not provide an adequate ethical framework for managing these assets: Brazil has shown itself unable to exploit the rainforest in a way fair to Brazilians of today or tomorrow, let alone the rest of us. But more noble principles of managing assets for the good of all are useless because states are incapable of acting in a disinterested way. “Economic utilitarianism is best suited for Disneyland,” concludes Collier.
For the rest of this article, please go to The Observer website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/16/plundered-planet-paul-collier-book-review