Equity What is Equity Equity Within Nations Equity Between Nations International Economic System Debt crisis Institutions Connections • Solutions Global Warming and Equity References Site Map Back to Main Menu...	Proposed Solutions Debt-For-Nature Swaps Aid Debt Forgiveness Governments from different countries look at sustainable development differently depending on their prosperity and state of development. The governments of high-income countries are more worried about global issues such as the greenhouse effect and the destruction of rainforests, and they want all nations to co-operate in tackling the problems. They see population increase and deforestation as major concerns. By contrast, the governments of poorer countries argue that the major global environmental problems are caused by the richer countries&emdash;where most of the pollution is created and most of the resources are consumed&emdash;and they object to population control and constraints on logging which are being pushed by more prosperous countries. People from poorer countries argue that the governments of high-income countries should look to their own activities first before telling others what to do. For example, Khor Kok Peng of the Malaysian Friends of the Earth group says: "It is unacceptable to preach that the Third World adopt appropriate technologies or preserve simple lifestyles whilst people in rich nations continue to destroy the world's resources in producing luxuries with capital intensive technologies." (p. 13) Some people in low-income countries are suspicious of the motivations for sustainable development. Dr Vandana Shiva, a leading Indian ecologist, argues that there is an element of affluent nations wanting to take control of resources in low-income countries currently controlled by local communities. Recently, after Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, suggested a plan to save the Brazilian Amazon, negotiations took place between the Brazilian President, Fernando Collor de Mello and officials from the World Bank and the European Community. Local governments within the rainforest states were bypassed altogether. (Pearce, F. 1992e) The plan calls for about a quarter of the Amazon to be protected. However, radical groups argue that, once the areas zoned to allow industry and agriculture are exhausted, 'it is almost inevitable that "protected areas" will be encroached upon'. This is because the setting aside of areas for protection does not address the social and political reasons behind forest destruction in the first place, such as the drive for economic growth. They say that the plan ensures that 'growth-oriented development programmes' can continue despite pressure for deforestation to stop (Pearce, F. 1992e, p. 38). Shiva (1992) also argues that the real problems are 'the economic drive to overexploit', and the lack of environmental regulation of the activities of companies that can move around the world and escape regulations of all sorts. She claims that local people in low-income countries are being identified as the biggest threat to natural resources, so that governments in high-income countries can avoid addressing the environmental problems arising from capitalism and corporate greed. Local people have been living in balance with their local resources for millennia, Shiva points out. Local environmental degradation has only happened recently because of global economic pressures and the actions of outside people. Deforestation is not a result of poor people collecting firewood in India, but rather of local people being overruled and displaced in the conversion of natural forests to industrial timber, common lands to private use, or private farmlands to industrial forestry use. She quotes a government survey which found that 'only two per cent of standing trees are ever cut for fuel wood by local rural communities. They use primarily dry fallen wood' (1992, p. 36). Her own surveys have confirmed this, and she argues that local people depend on trees being alive to be economically valuable, whereas the timber industry sees no value in them unless they are cut down and dead. Similarly, S. M. Mohamed Idris, president of the Consumers' Association of Penang, argues that 'it is not the poor who are responsible for environmental destruction; the poor are the victims' (p. 16). Environmental destruction is causing poverty. He argues that ecology needs to be seen 'in the context of an unequal distribution of resources, income and wealth worldwide and within each country' (p. 17). This unequal distribution, he says, causes those with most power to use up the world's resources, leading to displacement of the poor and continued poverty. The people with power are trying to manage the environmental crisis without removing the fundamental causes of it. They are trying to fix up the side-effects of economic growth. Maria-Elena Hurtado, director of the World Development Movement, favours economic growth. She criticises any move to curtail development in low-income countries. 'People in the South wonder whether the North's version of planetary salvation requires having 4 billion people perpetually poor in the South' (quoted in Pearce, F. 1991). She and others are calling for the removal of tariffs, relief from international debt and 'mandatory contributions' of money from the north to the south, with no strings attached. The inequity in resource use and wealth between countries was a major source of conflict at the United Nations' conference on environment and development, the Earth Summit, held in June 1992. New Scientist correspondent Pratap Chatterjee (1992a) noted that the US negotiators had been told to make sure that no decision was made at the summit that suggested US liability for environmental problems in poor countries or that mentioned new institutions or requests for more aid. Low-income nations demanded money to fund environmental projects and help with their economic development. They wanted a new fund to be set up to administer the greening of the planet. It would be democratically controlled by all nations, rich or poor, donor or recipient, each with one vote. The rich nations preferred to use an existing institution, set up by the World Bank in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme, the Global Environment Facility. People in low-income countries are also resentful of their lack of say in the way international affairs and even their own affairs are managed. If there were such a thing as a global democracy, the poor people of the low-income countries would form a majority and have much more say than they do at present. US citizens can 'halt a Brazilian dam or end tax concessions for cattle ranchers in rainforests. They can organise consumer resistance to imports of animal furs or tropical timbers or tuna' (Pearce, F. 1992h, p. 40). But the people of poor countries like Bangladesh cannot intervene in the development process of high-income countries to prevent them consuming too many resources or allowing their companies to pollute the oceans. Third-world activist Anil Agarwal points out that the sustainable development agenda does not address these power differences&emdash;it merely uses them to address environmental problems, such as pollution of the atmosphere and deforestation, that are of concern to those in rich countries. Other environmental problems that affect the livelihoods of people in low-income countries, such as desertification in low-income countries or the sustainable management of local forests and fisheries, are neglected (Pearce, F. 1992h, p. 40). Another activist, Chee Yoke Ling, argues that, despite massive lobbying efforts to get issues such as the debt crisis and the international economic system and institutions (World Bank, IMF and the GATT) onto the agenda of the Earth Summit, these issues were neglected. Instead, the focus was on what low-income countries could do: 'Have fewer people, don't cut down your forests, use less resources, slow down your growth' (p. 20). The Indian environment minister, Kamal Nath, has reacted to the premise that forests should be global resources and are the common heritage of all humans by saying, 'We do not talk about the globalisation of oil. Yet oil has a greater impact than forests on the global environment.' (Third World fends off control on forests' 1992) Source: Sharon Beder, The Nature of Sustainable Development, 2nd ed., Scribe, Newham, 1996, pp. 166-185.