Sustainable Development from the people's perspective
Much has been said about what is precisely the definition of sustainable development. One thing that complicates the matter is the conflicting interests of those wealthy, industrialised nations with those of developing and poor nations. Another is the finger pointings: the industrialised nations accused everybody but themselves of causing environmental catastrophies, or trivialised their roles on global warming and such. The lesser nations tend not to deny their own mistakes, but they often insist that the environmental vagaries are inevitable in eradicating poverty and developing their own economies. Unfortunately, what really happened was that the industrialised nations imposed their wills on the lesser nations, as if their economic models are all desirable for the so-called Third World nations. We may ask: why does a country like India want to build mega dams and invite multinational companies to bring in dirty and polluting industries, and evicting peasantry from the lands they had so preciously hang on to for hundreds of years? In the case of our country Malaysia, why do we want to grow more oil palm instead of increasing our food production for domestic uses?One of the problems giving rise to the vicious cycle of poverty in poor countries such as those in sub-Saharan region and Asia is the growing indebtedness to the world's moneylenders. It is ironic that the poor borrowed money in order to develop, but ended up serving the debt by pillaging their own natural resources to be sent to markets in the richer nations. Given the imbalanced trade relations between rich nations and the lesser ones, social problems and environmental degradation are the forgone conclusion of this vicious cycle. No thanks to the World Bank and IMF for financing destructive development schemes and applying harsh economic conditions on the poor, and to those stockbrokers, commodity traders, financial market manipulators and currency speculators who gain the most from the unjust world economic structures. And no thanks to multinational corporations which dominate 90% of the world resources and responsible for environmental deterioration in the global scale.
A prerequisite to sustainable development, first and foremost, is then a sovereign and nonsubservient country. By this we mean that a poor or a developing nation should be left to work on its priorities like, say building its local economies and feeding its entire population, and then move on to improve the living standard of its people. Even an independent country like Mexico, which is a really close neighbor to the United States, could not seem to work on eradicating poverty and improving lives of its Native peoples, as long as the American interests override its own priorities, and the Mexican politicians are busy enriching themselves. To put it more clearly, a nation should be free and have to work on addressing social justice and building domestic economies; these tasks being paramount in ensuring stability and equity.
The second is that the nature of economies must be radically changed. There should be no business as usual for the majority of multinational corporations and industrial countries. Instead, governments and developmental bodies of the world should and might have to be made to choose development schemes different from what has been prescribed, again and again and yet proven to be exploitative and destructive, by conventional economic wisdoms of the West. Market force alone will not follow the path of sustainability if it is not compelled to behave so.
A truly sustainable development should have two criteria regardless of who do the talkings:
that it should be ecologically sound and nondestructive.
Even a small impact on the environment should not be discounted because in the long run, the degree of damages might be significant and irreparable.that it should be equitable and nonexploitative.
This is the human side of it. A development scheme aimed at providing ownership to small-scale farmers and generating incomes on a sustainable basis, for example, should be favored over a large-scale scheme owned by capital-rich companies. If waged laborers are required as in plantation estates and factories, then the nature of the job should be nonexploitative and the wages should bring the laborers out of poverty, not keeping them dependent and poor, as in cases occured on rubber estate workers in Malaysia.Here two cases in point should be ample to illustrate how `unsustainable' and unjust development schemes could be: the Kerpan tiger prawn project in Kerpan, Kedah, and the mega-hydroelectric dam project in Bakun, Sarawak.
Priorities
- Reduce dependency of a nation on the vagaries of the international markets and promoting the nation's self-sufficiency
- Orientate the overall economic system towards meeting the needs of the nation's people - food, housing, education, health care, culture
- Favor local and small-scale ownerships of businesses, industries and agriculture
- Favor small-scale economic development, undertaken by small holders, cooperatives, and traditional communities
- Protect traditional communites and ecological systems
- Promote economic development which enhance the social and economic conditions of communities in rural areas, small towns, and big cities
- Create a robust economy at the national level where various local economic sector complements each other in creating a dynamic economic system within the nation
- Impose limits to economic growth which will ensure socio-economic justice and environmental sustainability
Principles of Satyagraha founded by Mahatma GandhiComing soon...
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Azhar Awang jengkatriangle @geocities.com [email protected] May 18, 1997
Updated: Feb 9, 1998
