Bottom Billion

Comment

The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, this week urges developed countries to look to the developing world to prevent what he characterised as a “lost decade”.

Writing in the Financial Times, Mr Zoellick describes the current malaise in Europe as not just “financial crisis, part two” but “sustainable growth challenge, part one”. The difference, he says, has implications for policy – get the diagnosis incorrect and the wrong treatment will follow.

Mr Zoellick warns that the €750 billion (US$915 billion) package to defend the euro will buy time but it is not enough. So far, the world has focused on fiscal contraction and debt, but this is only half the story – the world also needs a return to robust growth.
The World Bank president is calling for an acceleration of the shift in economic growth to the developing nations. This, he says, would enable them to “work out their problems while building a better-balanced global system”.

Mr Zoellick’s advice coincides with the publication of a book from a former director of development research at the World Bank, Paul Collier, who is now professor of economics at Oxford University.

In The Plundered Planet, Professor Collier confronts the “global mismanagement of the natural world”. He argues that proper stewardship of natural assets and the associated liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency. Natural resources, he stresses, have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart.

Professor Collier, who is also director of Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, examines developing countries and the poorest populations in his highly regarded book, The Bottom Billion, published in 2007.

In his new book, Professor Collier moves on, and proposes international standards that would help countries that are economically poor, but natural-resources rich, to manage their resources. The Plundered Planet seeks to chart a way to avoid mismanagement of the natural world.

The 270-page book has been published to widely varying reviews (we will publish our review shortly). While being generally applauded, in The Times for example, the book is also the subject of some sharp criticism, most dramatically by The Guardian and The Scotsman (“an eye-glazing layer of academic jargon”).

The differing reactions are not difficult to understand.
While Professor Collier begins by stating the obvious, namely that economists and environmentalists must come together, he goes on to argue that economic sustainability need not imply preservation, and that the world will “inevitably starve” if we seek harmony with nature. He agrees with Mr Zoellick in concluding that the developing countries need to be exploited further and faster.

The Plundered Planet distinguishes between ‘romantics’ and ‘ostriches’. The former, Professor Collier argues, have “conjured up a sense of Armageddon”. They believe we must radically alter our relationship to nature and scale back consumption, and will, he says, “see the world starve”. Ostriches, on the other hand, believe that ‘fussing’ about the environment will simply hand business initiatives to the Chinese. They, says Professor Collier, will “see the world burn”.

The romantics and ostriches are each half right. “We are seriously mismanaging nature,” says Professor Collier, but “much of what is said about nature is ridiculously pious”.
Decisions, he says, must be “founded on a proper sense of responsibility toward both the global poor and the future, not blinkered self-interest”.

Professor Collier argues “we have an ethical responsibility to bequeath to unborn generations either the natural assets bequeathed to us, or other assets of equivalent value”.
Controversially, he says that this does not mean we are ethically obliged to preserve every tiger or every tree. Professor Collier argues that preserving nature is not an end in itself. “We are the custodians of value, not the curators of artefacts or the natural world,” he adds.

Much of Professor Collier’s focus is on Africa, inevitably, and its population of around one billion people. The tragedy of Africa, he says, is a failure to capitalise on its natural assets.
Professor Collier believes that Africa’s economic problems are not that it has suffered a ‘resource curse’, or been plundered, but that less than a quarter of its natural resources have been brought to account.

Natural resources, says Professor Collier, are “valuable and they are vulnerable”. The current frontier for their exploitation, he argues, is “the quarter of the earth’s land surface that is home to the bottom billion”. Hence the scramble for Africa, which is the last technically accessible region to be explored but much of which is weakly governed.