International concern over the environment is forcing developing countries to make stark choices: either to forgo growth or to find ways to reconcile conservation and production. 

The Cold War is over — the green war has begun. Environmental issues are replacing the East-West divide as a source of international conflict. And in many Third World countries the confrontations are between conservationists and developers.

The new battle is over how much wealth can be squeezed out of the environment without causing it irrevocable damage and about how economic sacrifices should be shared.

The acrimony of some developing countries which fear that green demands may limit their growth was aired at December’s UN general assembly in New York. One official described the debate over the 1992 Brazil conference on environment and development as "the lengthiest and most difficult I have ever seen at the UN".

There was also disagreement over who should prepare a climate convention to set limits on carbon dioxide and other emissions which contribute to global warming. Developing countries fear that they will be asked to make a disproportionate contribution towards protecting the global environment. They point out that only 30 per cent of the world’s population live in developed countries but they consume 70 per cent of the resources.

They fear that restrictions on energy consumption will stifle badly needed economic growth. "We will need more, not less energy," says a high-ranking Indian official. "Energy conservation is all well and good, but it will never make up for our growing consumption of commercial fuel. And we cannot expect to match the savings made by industrial countries: they have more tat to shed. Central heating, an irrelevant factor in most of the South, accounts for a large part of their energy bill."

The speed with which environmental issues have shot to the top of the political agenda has given developing countries little time to think through the contradictory demands these pose. Export growth is a primary goal of IMF and World Bank adjustment programmes, yet most Third World countries have little to export but timber from their forests, food from their fragile soils and non-renewable minerals and oil.

If they resist the need to develop commercial energy sources because of the environmentally damaging emissions, they will not only put a brake on their economic growth, but will increase the pressure on tropical forests which provide firewood. And since trees also neutralise the impact of emissions by absorbing carbon dioxide, there will be no net gain.

Energy subsidies are frowned upon because they lead to over-use, but in China rural households which cook with highly polluting charcoal will only switch to the more expensive smokeless coal if they are subsidised.

With very low foreign investment and a scarcity of loans from foreign banks, most developing countries are relying heavily on aid from affluent countries or from international banks. But the focus on the environment is creating a shift in aid money away from productive investment and into projects to conserve natural resources. Funding for environmental schemes is influenced more by the Western emphasis dealing with climatic change than by the Third World’s pressing need to control soil erosion and water pollution.

Tim Lankester, permanent secretary at the UK’s Overseas Development Administration told a recent conference of London’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI): "I believe there is scope for some switching of assistance towards environment projects —energy conservation, for example. But we also accept there will have to be additional assistance, especially for global environment problems."

Lankester said the British government was emphasizing forestry, energy efficiency, population control and aid to developing countries to find substitutes for CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer. Challenged about the wisdom of aid-switching, Lankester said green concerns would continue to be a condition of aid in order to satisfy the UK lobby.

The conflict between North and South has been reawakened by a proposed convention on biodiversity being prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). Third World countries fear that the convention will lean too heavily towards conservation of genetic resources. They believe plant species are an economic resource that must be preserved but may also be exploited. Whole areas of Ethiopia, a genetically diverse country, might be turned into a botanical museum, one critic says.

If Western countries insist on conservation, they will have to compensate developing countries for forgoing the income they could earn from plants, trees, or crops grown on cleared land. "People in the North should admit that if we are taking to the South our environmental agenda, we also have to make the means available to meet that agenda," says Edward Barbier, of the London Environmental Economics Center.

He adds: "We have no right to ask them to preserve their tropical forests unless we sit down with them and work out a measure of compensation for what they are giving up."

Conservationists and developers are frequently clashing over dams that drown large tracts of land and displace people, factories that pollute rivers, and logging operations that interfere with forests.

"It is the perennial dilemma," says a senior Unep official in Bangkok. "Most developed countries did not look seriously at the environment until they had a per capita income three times higher than in Thailand. There are efforts to integrate development and the environment but understandably people want the benefits first."

The Third World does not wholly support the argument about the long-term costs of subjecting nature to unbearable stress. An Ivorian economist, Z Zoukpo, who works for the African Development Bank, asked the ODI conference: "Is there a development stage countries need to reach before they can look after their environment? Aren’t we in developing countries being pushed into a degree of greenness for which we are not prepared?"

Zoukpo argues that Côte d’Ivoire needs exports such as timber to improve education and infrastructure, two essential requirements for attracting the foreign investment it needs to diversify its economy. Without economic diversification, it will be forced to continue depleting its natural resources.

Environmental economists such as Jeffrey Leonard of the Conservation Foundation in Washington warn that the need of developing countries to protect their environment is more urgent than it was for developed countries when they began to industrialize.

The range of pollutants used in Bombay, Beijing or São Paulo is greater than in the 19th century in Europe or the US — the black smoke and noxious water discharges now also contain toxic chemical fertilizers, fuels and plastics. Disasters such as Chernobyl or Bhopal were unheard of when England embarked on the road to industrialization.

The belief that the atmosphere, oceans and soil have an infinite capacity to absorb pollutants has been undermined by evidence of the destruction of the ozone layer, which filters out ultraviolet radiation, and by forecasts of climate changes.

Tropical ecosystems such as those of sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon are more fragile and less capable of regeneration than those of temperate climates. "If you throw money at the Cuyahoga river in the US you can clean it but the damage to a fragile, complex tropical ecosystem is irreversible," says Robert Goodland, of the Bank’s environment division. "Even if it were possible to restore their environments, developing countries haven’t got the money to do it."

Third World countries are faced with environmental emergencies which threaten health, economic productivity and the supply of some raw materials. In Thailand, the lush green forests and terraces of Ban Mae Poen are gone. The once-idyllic village in the northern province of Chaing Rai is surrounded by denuded hills and fallow soil.

In Bangkok, vehicles spew out a tonne of lead a day, while 1.25-million cubic metres of untreated waste are dumped into the mighty Chao Phraya River. The Thailand Development Research Institute estimates that by 2000 the Chao Phraya will have run out of oxygen, killing all aquatic life.

Elsewhere in Thailand, toxic rivers and polluted seas are destroying the fisheries, one of the main economic activities.

The climate in Southeast Asia is also becoming increasingly unpredictable. In November, Thailand’s most violent typhoon for 27 years ravaged large areas of land in the south. In Indonesia, the dry season has begun earlier than usual:

Jakarta, which usually enters its dry season in late April, has been hot since February. In contrast, there were severe floods in Kalimantan province last year.

The environmental threat is now so serious that the government has been forced into action. Because of the pollution of at least 20 rivers in eight Indonesian provinces, Emil Salim, minister for environment and population, has reached agreement with industry to prevent noxious effluents being discharged into the waters. Polluters will be penalised.

The grey cloud which hangs over the Mexico City valley comprises 5-million tonnes of ozone, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, heavy particles and faecal dust from shanty towns built on dry lake-beds. Until January there was no central system for measuring the effects of this toxic blend on the health of the city’s 20-million people.

In an attempt to clean up Mexico City’s filthy air, a one day per week ban was imposed on private cars in the city centre. In the first five months of the scheme, pollution levels have fallen by between 8 per cent and 10 per cent.

Third World environment ministers would be better equipped to deal with such problems if they could cost the scale of the environmental degradation with a measure of depleted resources, lost government revenues, lower agricultural productivity or dwindling fisheries; several countries, including Brazil, India, the Philippines and Thailand are carrying out environmental assessments of large projects such as dams.

But the conclusions of such assessments are often challenged by developers and environmentalists. Edward Barbier says: ‘We have to improve the methodologies of how to assess the environment to do it better and faster. It must become part of the routine; at present, it is not integrated sufficiently into the project cycle so it’s often done as an afterthought."

He believes that governments and economists need educating in the management of natural resources since more environmental damage is done by macroeconomic policies than by the sum total of all the environmentally destructive projects.

If the negative impacts are known, it is often possible to mitigate them by adopting agricultural practices appropriate to fragile environments, installing pollution-abatement equipment in factories, recycling waste, or setting taxes and or prices that reflect the real economic value of natural resources.

Rational trade-offs between more consumption and growth and the preservation and improvement of the environment cannot be made unless the environment is treated like any other form of capital. Economists in developed countries and at international organizations such as the Bank and Unep are examining ways of incorporating environmental costs into national accounts.

if~ the environment was given a monetary value, deductions would be made for the degree to which minerals and resources are being depleted. "Countries make wrong policies because the national accounts do not tell them the right story," says Bank economist Salah El-Serafy. "And then we have the absurdity that if you dump waste in a river, it does not get into the national accounts. But if you clean it up, the impact on the national accounts is positive."

An accurate evaluation of environmental damage is often difficult in developing countries because of the lack of market signals. Furthermore, Third World governments dislike the idea of incorporating the environment into their national accounts. As they live off their natural resources, any discount for their use would reduce their gross national product and their credit rating.

"You can’t count deforestation as a cost because we have no alternative," says Z Zoukpo of Cóte d’Ivoire.

Many Third World countries do not have the means to adopt the optimum environmental solutions. China, expected to be a large future contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide, is using a cheap coal-burning technology with only 25 per cent efficiency yet a newer, more expensive technology it exports is 35 per cent efficient.

"We need to establish safe minimum environmental standards that can be compatible with adequate levels of economic growth," says James Winpenny, an ODI economist in London. "We need to know how it is to be sustained — how many mangroves, how much biodiversity we need. The Third World cannot be turned into a huge natural reserve."

This view is anathema to conservationists who consider that forests or mangroves will be endangered by commercial exploitation. But unless developing countries can see tangible benefits from changing environmentally unsound practices, they are unlikely to change their ways. The challenge is to strike a balance between the ideal and the practical solutions. 

-Maria Elena Hurtado

Source : South, June, 1990

Back to Archive Page

Recycling Point Dot Com

(C) 2000 All Rights Reserved