Poor Environment Mirrors Poor Economy

The rhetoric may be about limits to growth, but it’s a safe bet that the model on the minds of poor nations at this week’s environmental summit will be South Korea.

The Asian nation’s headlong economic growth, which has brought it industrial status and considerable riches in recent decades, is the real inspiration for efforts to get the economy moving in China, India and many other nations among the poor of the Earth.

Yes, South Korea has environmental problems--among other things, serious air pollution in Seoul--but so do most other countries in the developing world. The air is foul in Tehran, Beijing and Mexico City too. The difference is that Korea has money to deal with its problems.

And therein lies a powerful insight for anyone worried, confused or simply bored by all the talk of global warming and shrinking forests that will be coming out of Rio de Janeiro in the next two weeks.

The real issue facing the 30,000 delegates and more than 100 world leaders at the summit this week is poverty: How 3 billion people in the world’s low-income economies--those with less than $600 a year in income per citizen--can climb out of it. Both China and India, along with Vietnam and much of Africa, including Egypt, are in that low-income group.

“How we’ll finance the poor nations getting on the path of sustainable development is the true subject of this conference,” says Peter Goldmark, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which helped plan and underwrite the Rio summit.

For financing, the United Nations suggests that Western Europe, Japan and North America set up a $125-billion aid fund for the mostly poor nations of the rest of the world.

But such a fund won’t be forthcoming; developed countries have their own troubles at home. So economic and environmental betterment will have to be funded by private investment. And that being the case, it will be useful if the Rio summit spends less time debating the side issue of global warming, and more on the depredations of poverty that are the real causes of human suffering and environmental neglect.

Keep in mind, we’re dealing with the consequences of success. There are now 5.3 billion people in the world, 66% more than 20 years ago. That’s the good news: Such population growth results from improved health care, allowing fewer infants to die in childbirth, and their mothers and fathers to live longer. Life expectancy in developing countries has increased in recent decades from 51 to 63 years, according to the World Bank.

Success in health care has been matched in agriculture. The capability exists today to grow sufficient food to feed every person in the world. And that capability is increasing with the advent of biotechnology, which will increase crop yields while reducing use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and so on.

The problem is economic--how to distribute the food, or more accurately, how to distribute the farming and scientific know-how of raising food so that poor nations can better themselves.

South Korea, for example, was a poor nation 30 years ago, on a par economically with Egypt. But Korea learned about devoting national savings to industry, and about training industrial workers. It was helped by access to the U.S. market for its exports. And it lifted its standard of living. Measured by national income per person, South Korea’s economy is now nine times that of Egypt.

What that means beyond mere numbers is that Korea has a higher health standard, it has clean drinking water.

Unclean drinking water, far more than global warming, is an environmental killer. In poor countries, millions of children die each year from dysentery; they will die in shantytowns in the hills above Rio even as speeches continue at the environmental summit below.

Developing nations understand the connection between poverty and disease, which is why they are determined to have economic growth, using whatever means they possess.

China, for example, has massive coal reserves and will burn coal to fuel industry regardless of environmental consequences. The challenge for the developed world will be to spur investment and economic betterment in China so that it burns coal efficiently, in modern fluidized-bed combustion systems, which reduce waste heat and neutralize toxic gases.

Investment is not a pipe dream. India, for example, is turning to free market methods to spur its vast economy beyond subsistence levels. And already $4 billion in new investment has come to India, reports the Economist magazine, from Indian business people in Britain and America.

Big companies from Europe, Japan and the U.S. are represented in Brazil this week because they see opportunity in environmental development.

Many people don’t link investment and economic growth with environmental improvement. But they’re thinking of yesterday’s industrial economies, not those of today and tomorrow. In the rich countries today--and in Korea and Taiwan too--microchip-guided machines deliver more output from fewer resources with vastly less use of electricity.

Japan, the model of industrial efficiency, can now add 1% to its gross national product using only half the resources and energy the United States must use.

In the advanced nations, the future promises massive efforts to develop environmentally sound products and processes--for industry, agriculture and consumer use.

The challenge is to bring knowledge of such marvels to the world’s poor villages so they do not continue polluting their drinking water and burning the forest for firewood.

The Earth Summit can help the environment if it acknowledges that the problem is how to foster economic growth, not limit it.