Sustainable development is nonsense

Sustainable development is nonsense

Leon Louw is a libertarian from Africa, where state failure is the norm. He runs the Johannesburg-based Free Market Foundation and is the director of the Good Laws Project. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with his wife, Frances Kendall. These are previously unpublished excerpts from an impromptu interview with Sauvik Chakraverti when Leon was in Delhi to deliver the Julian L Simon lecture of Liberty Institute in 2002.

What is your central message to environmentalists in the developing world?

Environmentalists are enemies of the poor. What the poor and future generations need is maximum economic growth, maximum technology, and maximum utilization of resources, now. So we can a) alleviate human suffering, and b) leave a legacy of technology and wealth with which to deal with environmental problems that may happen in the future.

What is your view on ’sustainable development’?

It is nonsense. The world ’sustainable’ has no intelligible meaning. Sustainable for how long and for whom, we are never told. Development is sustainable. What is not is the absence of development. Without development, people will, in fact, starve and the environment will be destroyed. The most developed countries are the ones with the cleanest air, the cleanest rivers, the least human suffering, the best conservation of nature, and the least endangered species.

What is your reaction to sustainable development’s underlying premise - that there is a shortage of natural resources and that these will finish if markets are free?

Resources are increasingly plentiful. There are more resources of every description today than there have ever been before. The evidence of this is falling prices. Almost everything in the world is now falling in price, even though currencies have been inflated.

The real way to consider this issue is to look at how much time a human being has to work to buy, for example, a pound of potatoes. Absolutely every resource that human beings want is now cheaper. That is to say, you can get more of it with an hour of labour than ever before in history.

Furthermore, the earth’s surface contains enough resources to last for millions of years. Even if we do ever run out of resources on land, we’ve still got the ocean. Even if the oceans’ resources were to be exhausted in, say, five million years, we can harvest the asteroids.

You have described environmentalists as racists. Please explain:

When they talk about overpopulation, they - that is, the white elites of the First World - never call Holland, Monaco, Britain, or Liechtenstein overpopulated. In fact, the most densely populated continent is Europe. They speak of my continent, Africa, as overpopulated; yet it has the lowest density of population. Africa has too few people. What they want to do is limit the number of people of colour.

Even more conspicuously racist are ozone concerns. White people worry about ozone depletion because they do not want UV rays on their skin. On the other hand, dark people are immune to UV rays. Even white people who are slightly dark, like Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, Spaniards or South African whites, are immune to ozone depletion.

Is Africa going the libertarian way or is it keeping with the environmentalist agenda?

Unfortunately, Africa is as subject as India to the eco-imperialism of the West. Africa, therefore, signs all the international treaties and protocols that ban trade in its own wildlife. Yet Europe can farm and trade its wildlife, namely cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. This is imperialism of the absolutely worst kind.

In his writings, George Ayittey refers constantly to the ‘vampire states’ of Africa. Is there any libertarian upsurge against big government in Africa?

Africa, thanks to people like George Ayittey, has turned the corner. Most African countries are now moving towards market economies. Fifteen years ago, there was only one democracy in Africa — that is, Botswana. Now, most African countries are democracies.

Fifteen years ago, most African countries were in favour of socialism. Now most of them are liberalizing and privatizing. The reward for this has been that the continent is experiencing positive growth — about 3.5 per cent — for the first time since colonial times. Those African countries, which have made the most substantial moves toward market economies, are growing even faster: Botswana, Mauritius, and Uganda.

George Ayittey is absolutely right in saying that black oppressors took over when the white oppressors left. The absence of white oppressors does not mean the presence of liberty.

However, we are finally getting real liberation in Africa. Liberation from oppression, rather than just liberation from colonial exploitation. I am optimistic.

(More on Ayittey here. Yazad)

How is the new South Africa faring in terms of economic and political freedom?

The giant achievement, of course, is the liberation of black South Africa from apartheid, discrimination and humiliation. So this victory must not be trivialized.

Unfortunately, in many liberation struggles, those who take over the ‘liberated’ country often perpetuate far too much of what they have inherited. They keep the very institutions that caused oppression and discrimination in the first place. They should, instead, attempt to change the entire legislative system to one based on objective rules and minimal legislation. In South Africa, sadly, we do not see this.

At the same time, the absence of apartheid has created new opportunities and black South Africans have used these. In the informal, shadowy, underground economy, there has been an explosion of enterprise. Fortunately, they just ignore the government. In South Africa, ordinary people just pretend that the government is not there. They run their businesses, taxi services and so on without licenses and trade wherever they wish. In India, by contrast, people seem to take the government too seriously.

Why are legal reforms essential for developing countries?

One of the great transitions that have not taken place in the former colonies is the key element that has made developed countries prosper. This is the rule of law. We have identified a list of twenty-five jurisprudential components of what we call ‘good law’. They have nothing to do with ideology. Every lawyer agrees on the principles of good law. Most developing countries have failed to maintain these principles.

From your studies of regulatory systems, do you think they impose more costs than the benefits they provide?

Yes, this is almost always true. Certainly, since countries have introduced cost-benefit analysis for new laws, it is quite shocking to find how many new laws, that were taken for granted before, would not have been adopted.

In the real world, regulations have more costs and disadvantages than advantages. This is because regulation is subject to what political scientists call “goal substitution”, in which those implementing it have their own objectives and agenda. It is very rare indeed, in the real world, to find any regulation for which the advantages, properly calculated, outweigh the disadvantages.

How do you look at the impact of globalization, particularly from the perspective of the economic and political prospects of the poor?

Globalization is not new. The world was completely globalized up to the First World War, when capital, wealth and people could move freely across borders. Between the First and Second World Wars, borders closed for the first time in history. So what we now call globalization is a small modest shift towards what was commonplace and taken for granted by our grand parents. What they experienced as being normal, we now seem to think of as some new, scary concept.

What the poor want is maximum globalization. They want to be able to sell their products to everyone on earth. They also want to be able to buy from anyone who sells anything.

The opposition to globalization is completely inhumane. People who have seen real poverty cannot possibly support restrictions on trade. Globalization is, by far, the best hope for the world’s poor, and the quicker it happens and the more of it they get, the better.

Minor editing, title and links added by Yazad. Thanks also to Amol Hatwar who helped sort out an irritating formatting problem with MSWord