At the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development last week in Johannesburg, South Africa, attention held fast, though not without distraction, to the problem of poverty. For international meetings on weighty global issues, it seems, there is hope.
The oil and gas industry should welcome this new emphasis. It nudges the otherwise diffractive subject of "sustainable development" toward focus around what should be the chief concern in discussions of economics and the environment: the well-being of people. Protests from environmental pressure groups testify to the merits of this shift. Environmentalists' political agenda subordinates humanity to narrowly defined natural values and idealizes lifestyles most people never would choose for themselves. Too much of the agenda resists economic development essential to the struggle against poverty.
The Johannesburg meeting began to make the phrase "sustainable development" mean something by asserting that people belong at the center of the concept. Now forced to share a rhetorical tool to which they formerly claimed exclusive license, environmentalists will find it more difficult than before to dictate terms of the debate. This is progress.
Acting on poverty
But what now? Talking about poverty is not the same as doing something about it. And doing something about poverty must amount to more than moving wealth from rich countries to poor ones-which is not to deny foreign aid a place in the program. A sincere global fight against poverty requires change by rich and poor alike. Constructive initial steps are not difficult to envision.
Rich, developed countries, for example, might quit talking one way about the benefits of trade and acting another. They can dismantle protective tariffs, especially those on imports of agricultural goods. Farm tariffs starve people in some countries by enriching food producers in others. What can be right about that? Developed countries also might foreswear the use of economic sanctions as tools of foreign policy. Sanctions deliberately impoverish people and usually have no effect on the governments they're supposed to influence. The US has been especially reckless with them.
Among developing countries, useful change would include serious efforts to end corruption. Developing countries should expect neither steadily rising aid from wealthy countries nor unconstrained investment from abroad until they address this chronic problem.
Another constructive step by developing countries would be the strengthening of democratic institutions. The record is clear: Economies perform best where people participate in governance.
Developing and developed countries alike share ways to change in service to sustainable development centered on human prosperity.
All countries, for example, can become realistic about international agreements-beginning with the word "agreement." Case in point: the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. The US has officially stated its reluctance to make economic sacrifice to dubious theories about global warming. Europe, historically more hospitable than the US to taxation and apparently more ready to act on imperfect data, is trying to scold its rebellious offspring into compliance. It won't work.
The US government fundamentally disagrees with Europe and much of the rest of the world on this issue. So there is, by definition, no international agreement. Do international relations crumble because of failure to reach accord on a single question? No. Does human progress cease? No. Will the planet broil because the US stood firm against climate alarmism? No.
Along with learning to accommodate honest disagreement, countries acting internationally can resist the temptation to tell individuals how to live. The urge to centralize authority and aggressively regulate seems to magnify in international meetings, which tend therefore to produce action plans with little realistic chance for implementation. That's why so much frustration effused from Johannesburg over lack of action on past agreements.
Constructive purpose
Countries also can align righteous environmental concern with constructive purpose. Environmentalism as a political influence remains too obstructionist, counting as triumph whatever economic activity it forecloses. Nothing promotes poverty like development that never happens. Properly centered on human well-being, sustainable development would have no use for environmentalism that treats humanity as inherently alien from and hostile to nature.
Above all, countries committed to sustainable development would rely as much as possible on the creative potential of free people at work in free markets. If they acted on that trust, the rest would fall naturally into place.
