Cheong Suk-Wai Straits Times 26 Jan 11;
OXFORD University economics don Paul Collier's son Daniel, then eight, came home from school one day in tears and hopping mad at Dad.
Professor Collier, 61, recalls: 'He looked at me and said strangely, 'Tell the President!' He had seen me on television with President Barack Obama and had got rather inflated views about my influence.'
It turned out that young Daniel had been told at school that his father's generation was using up so much resources that he might never get to see a rainforest. That inspired Prof Collier, author of the award-winning The Bottom Billion, to write his latest tome, The Plundered Planet, which tries to understand 'why Daniel thinks he has rights over the rainforest but not over our neighbour's car'.
The married father of three is a global expert on poverty and is now director of Oxford's Centre for the Study of African Economies, after serving five years as the World Bank's development research group head. He still advises the bank, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the British government.
I called him recently to learn more about his attempt to get all countries to use nature more responsibly:
# Why have you made studying the world's poorest countries your life's work?
First, for these countries, most of their undiscovered natural assets are going to be hugely valuable over the next decade or two, and will be extracted. So there will be a tidal wave of money coming into these countries. But, of course, if history repeats itself, that will result in a missed opportunity for these countries to better themselves. And it's a one-shot opportunity; these assets will be depleted and then gone forever. So it's vital that these countries harness this opportunity by making decisions differently so that history does not repeat itself.
And second, because this issue has to do with the natural environment, natural assets in the poorest countries, it's also about those in rich countries. I've dedicated my latest book to my two younger children aged two and three because it's their future that we are determining.
# How could we do better in that?
We don't own natural assets in the same way that we own other stuff. We don't have rights to burn such assets up without regard to their future... We've to try and see what it means to manage natural assets and liabilities responsibly.
# What does being responsible mean?
Some people are ostriches; they just ignore the obvious. At the other extreme, there are the sort of romantic environmentalists who just want to preserve nature as it is, regardless of the cost. That's not a responsible attitude to the future any more than being an ostrich.
# Extremes are seldom instructive. So what really works?
What I'm trying to do is build a powerful centre ground in what, until now, has been a polarised debate between the environmental fundamentalists and the ostriches. Neither are right. The position we need is that the future has rights concerning the value of nature rather than just seeing it as a bunch of artefacts.
All I'm trying to show is that the future co-owns nature with the present and so we have to protect the future's rights even though, in other dimensions, we may not care very much about the future. Otherwise, ignoring such rights would be fundamentally unethical. If I buy a car, it's mine. But I don't have the equivalent right to use up the natural world. If I do use it up, I have to pass on something equivalent to its value to the future.
# Why would the average Joe buy into your view?
The world is changing. The days when everything depended on a few good leaders are going. What's coming is leaders being swayed by what their citizens think matter. Part of The Plundered Planet is to say that citizens can be misled easily. So there are actually two battles out there today: One is between good and bad ideas, with the bad ones manipulated by commercial interests. One of these is the biofuels scam in the United States, which is about the agricultural lobby using ridiculous arguments in their hunt for subsidies.
The other battle is that it's getting easier to build a critical mass of informed opinion these days, a mass which can sufficiently influence what governments do.
# Which of these two battles worries you more and why?
I'm more concerned about the battle for ideas because it can mislead the citizenry so easily. One example would be the ban on GM (genetically modified) crops. Europe and then Africa banned these crops. But Africa desperately needs crop adaptation and GM crops are a useful technology for that. But a range of anti-GM, anti- American and anti-commercialism groups have been hijacked by the power of European agricultural protectionism which wanted to stop the import of GM grains. This sort of cheap moralising about nature has got ahead of understanding the science.
# But is it only cheap moralising when consuming GM crops might harm one's health?
I think of these things as a balance of risks and, certainly, in Africa, the risk of death from not having enough food is going up. Everything I've learnt since 1996 is that the risk of not having GM crops in Africa has gone up because its population has grown and there's also climatic deterioration. And we've not actually learnt anything from science that points to GM grains being a problem for those who consume them. I don't want to be ideological here but I do want to say that we have to look at this issue on a balance-of-risks (basis) rather than on the ruddy notion of some antipathy to science.
# But how are we going to make your ideas work when power is with the few and we need to plunder nature to keep us going?
Okay, let's take these two issues in turn: first, the power of the elite. You know, the elite can actually guide society quite well. Asian societies, for example, have been guided by the elite pretty successfully from poverty to prosperity. The critical mass within some societies might be the critical mass within some of the elite - people who are properly informed. So the process by which ideas are influenced doesn't have to be through the ballot box. For example, the bumiputera elite in Malaysia through the 1970s did guide its society towards prosperity. It wasn't really a democratic process but it was a shared vision among the elite and bumiputeras.
# Hasn't that shared vision benefited only a select group?
The Malaysian national oil company wasn't plundered in the same way that, say, the Nigerian national oil company was; the Nigerians running it had a mechanism to plunder it.
# But isn't such a comparison merely a matter of degree?
My broad approximation of the Asian elite is that they did take a broader view consistent with their nations doing well. Whereas, on the whole, the African elite had a weaker sense of the nation and so were just concerned with plundering.
You're viewing everything from the pristine perfection of Singapore. If you were sitting in Africa, Malaysia would look very attractive indeed. I was in Angola addressing its government recently and said: 'Angola has two possible futures in 30 years' time - one, to be like Kuala Lumpur today, and the other to be like Lagos today. And let me tell you, at the moment, Angolan society is booked on the plane to Lagos.' Now, that really had an impact. They invited Malaysians to advise them.
