The Plundered Planet

Paul Collier

The book’s outstanding features are the clarity with which it explains to the lay reader the dilemma of ongoing global development versus ongoing global destruction, and the coherence with which it steers us through the complexities of global commodity and food economics. It suggests thought-provoking solutions, in cogent and compelling prose, to the problems posed by the unequal distribution of global resources.

Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford. The Plundered Planet builds on his seminal work, The Bottom Billion. It challenges the existing order, in which economist is set against environmentalist, the economist demanding that we exploit – in some cases, to the death – every natural resource, while the environmentalist champions conservation, despite the fact that this locks the Third World poor into inefficient agricultural economies as a result of which they are starving, or will starve, as population grows and climate change accelerates.