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.

Collier’s presentation of the paradoxes, and the strategies by which we may seek to resolve them, are lucid and impressive. He proposes a pan-global economic and environmental overview, where regulation essential to the planet’s, and our own, survival is imposed by consensus, but, if necessary, by sanction. The First World helps the Third World and each repays the other in a transparent and workable model.

Collier’s thesis is hard to disagree with. His book has the elements of a milestone work that will influence thinking on this subject into the future. The sheer scale of the problem – the geopolitics of the world’s 194 governments, many at loggerheads with one another, and the disparities of wealth, education and democracy, or lack of it – is a huge challenge. There are the blind and those who look the other way: there are the outright plunderers and the well-meaning, but sometimes shortsighted, do-gooders.

Collier’s starting point is that conservation of resources must go hand-in-hand with hard-headed pragmatism. He says “an ethics of nature” accord must be formulated and recognised internationally. This would be a defined, unequivocal value system aimed at curtailing the mismanagement of nature, assisting poor countries that are rich in natural resources in managing their assets for the general good, and developing international policies to increase world food supply.

“In the task of building an informed citizenry, the starting point is an ethics of nature that people in societies with widely different value systems can understand and accept,” he writes. Until citizens are better informed, governments will adopt “gesture politics”. I believe that, close to home, we can see such ‘window-dressing’ gestures in the European Union payment of ‘compensation to fishermen’ for licences to hoover up the fish that traditionally sustained communities and are now close to extinction in Senegal.

I have spoken to fishermen in these communities: they have seen not a penny while, they say, government ministers salt away the millions. The EU ministries know this, but they continue to buy the licences, even as the once self-sustaining communities become reliant upon charity – ironically, EU aid. We, in Ireland, have been complicit in this travesty. When our Irish-owned super-trawler, The Atlantic Dawn, could not get a fishing licence due to international regulations, it was conveniently registered by our government as part of the Irish merchant fleet. It then got down to business, taking 400 tons of fish a day off Senegal and Mauritania, with a capacity for 7,000 tons of fish in its hold.

In a chapter entitled, ‘Is Fish a Natural Asset?’, Collier writes that “oil, copper and all the other minerals can only be used once and they are intrinsically depleting natural assets. But nature is also a factory, able to continue production indefinitely. Such renewable assets are a double blessing. We did not create them and yet we can harvest them for eternity. The menace of plunder is even starker with renewable natural assets than it was with depletable natural assets.” Elsewhere, he writes “for those natural assets and liabilities which are global, such as the fish in the oceans and the carbon of the skies, plunder is currently the standard. Indeed, the most energetic plunderers of these global natural assets are the governments and citizens of the rich societies.”

To paraphrase poet John Donne, no nation is an island, entire of itself; “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” As the tides rise, global climate change must be contained. Ironically, climate change is “making Africa even hotter and drier, while warming vast tracts of North America and Eurasia currently too cold for cultivation.” An enlightened, trans-global ethic, toward natural resources, would assist in maintaining the natural system that sustains our lives.

Collier acknowledges the benefits of industrialisation, but also the difficulties: “The more prosperity has distanced us from nature, the more we demand that governments protect it from science ... as with stem-cell research and genetically modified food.”

In the rich nations, the ‘peasant lifestyle’ has come to represent a harmonious life and NGOs dedicated to the eradication of poverty often reflect this iconising of the small farmer lifestyle and “the environmental concerns of the wealthy countries that fund them. But curtailing technology and discouraging the commercialisation of African agriculture has tended to increase the price of food, and food is the main item of expenditure in poor households.”

“The poorest countries need rapid economic growth and this creates a potential tension between poverty reduction and the preservation of nature.” Both the economists’ utilitarian and pragmatic view of development, and the environmentalists’ reservations about headlong ‘progress’ must be reconciled. “The argument of this book is that environmentalists and economists need each other ... they are on the same side of a war that is being lost ... effective solutions to vital problems (lie) in the centre.”

Collier summaries the need for global overview in three formulas: nature + technology + regulation = prosperity; nature + technology – regulation = plunder; nature + regulation – technology = hunger. Readers may see relevance in one or more of the above to our own recent economic meltdown.