The Right to Stop Development

A FEATURE FROM NGONET AT RIO

Gustavo Esteva

Third World countries have fought hard to ensure that "the right to development" is included in the Rio Declaration. The concept of an international right to development dates back to the debates in the 1970s on the New International Economic Order -- and since then the insurmountable contradictions this "right" poses have become ever clearer.

The governments of the "underdeveloped" countries want to "develop"; to be like the "developed" -- a goal as unfeasible as it is irrational. They believe that development is consistent with national sovereignty and internally-driven social change, but they renounce their independence of action by demanding help from the rich countries.

In 1976, President Marcos of the Philippines, speaking on behalf of G-77, claimed that: "If the rich countries do not intervene to foster the growth of the underdeveloped countries, they must not hope to get rid of the burden of those not being helped by them." The present call to the rich in the name of the environment contains a similar message of blackmail: if the rich do not help the poor to fight poverty and underdevelopment, the poor will inevitably continue their destruction of natural resources.

Development, however, is an experiment that, in the experience of the world's majority, has failed miserably. Development offered an Utopia: all countries would have access to the American way of life. So Truman promised in the post-War years. Everybody believed him: Nehru and Stalin, Nasser and Willy Brandt. "Sustainable development" is an attempt to rehabilitate the Utopia, while hiding the contradictions of the idea and making the illusion appear real. If feasible -- and it is not -- the Americanization of the globe would be an indescribable ecological catastrophe.

Development promised to reduce the gap between rich and poor countries, yet that gap has grown steadily through the post-War development decades. Wassily Leontief and his clan of economists manipulated every possible figure to be able to come up with a scenario for the UN in which the gap between the per capita GNP of rich and poor would diminish from 12 to 1, in 1970, to 7 to 1 in the year 2000. Yet now it would be a huge task just to get back to the size of the gap in 1970, and even a significant acheivement to prevent the divide from widening further.

Development does not remedy injustice between countries, but aggravates it.

Leontief attempted to prove that world development was feasible and would produce no ecological damage. In his scenario, per capita product would grow uninterrupted, between 1970 and 2000, at an annual rate of 4.9 per cent in the poor countries and 3 per cent in the rich, without causing adverse ecological impacts. At the time many accepted Leontief's fantastic conclusions; today, the conclusions illustrate the perverse ideology of developers and the extent to which they are forced to give up any sense of reality to protect their position. Development and environmental protection are incompatible.

If you live in Rio or Mexico City you need to be very rich or very stupid to fail to notice that development stinks. To hide the odour, every kind of deodorant has been applied in recent years: 'integral', 'social', endogenous', 'human', participatory' . . . and 'sustainable' development. Development promises cultural enrichment, while wiping out complete living cultures to implant its global monoculture. If the real issue is to sustain nature and culture, not development; if what matters is to respect peoples, in all their diversity, and enable their flourishing and enduring, thus allowing them to care for their natural and cultural environments -- then we need to say 'no' to development, to all and every form of development. And that is, precisely, what the social majorities -- for whom development was always a threat -- are asking for.

We are living in peculiar times, forcing us to find answers in the past, because we cannot find them in the present and even less in an increasingly uncertain future. We need to look back. The past, however, may be a source of inspiration and values, or an unbearable burden, a necrophiliac binding. While people in the villages and barrios are finding in their traditions inspiration to cope sensibly and wisely with their present predicament, international development bureaucrats have merely been shuffling their files, retrieving battered emblems which continue to paralyse their usually limited imagination.

If any right should be approved at UNCED it should be the right to stop development. (ends/ngonet at rio/13/6/92/1)

source: en.unced.general, pegasus electronic conference.

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