False Economy - Alan Beattie [52]
Chapter 4: Natural Resources: Why Are Oil and Diamonds More Trouble Than They Are Worth?
In John Steinbeck's haunting novel The Pearl, a poor Mexican fisherman, Kino, discovers to his terrible cost the destructive power of natural wealth. He finds a giant pearl—not a once-in-a-lifetime but a once-in-a-century gem. "It is the Pearl of the World," he declares. His horizons broaden. He can buy a rifle; he can send his son to school.
But his treasure brings nothing but evil. "All manner of people grew interested in Kino—people with things to sell and people with favors to ask," says the narrator. "Every man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl, and Kino's pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy. The news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld."
The local pearl buyers collude to try to cheat him, pretending that it is of little value. Kino is attacked by unknown figures in the night. He flees with his family to the big city to sell the pearl himself. On the way, thieves follow him and kill his son while hunting for the prize.
Kino's treasure is unique and irreplaceable and becomes more important than life. In the end it is worth less than nothing. Many countries, being apparently blessed with lucky gifts of rare and precious minerals, also find themselves worse off for having found them. Like the pearl, the discovery of oil or diamonds induces envy and greed, turns traders into thieves and business people into bounty hunters, encourages rivalry over cooperation, and in the end often causes more harm than good to the finder.
The destructive power of gems is particularly perverse. In the final analysis, many of them are valuable only because they are valuable. There is nothing irreplaceable about diamonds. Cubic zirconia jewelry can be made that's indistinguishable from diamonds to all but an expert eye; gems for industrial use can be created artificially far more cheaply than by mining the natural stone. And the price of diamonds was kept high for decades when they were bought and kept in vaults by a global cartel. When the human race is put on trial, this will be one of the strangest and strongest charges against it: that it valued men's lives less than a gem whose price hung upon nothing but itself, and which was hauled up from the dark recesses of the earth, cut and polished into a jewel of white fire, and then returned, unseen, deep underground.
Oil, a central ingredient in modern industrial production, is at least a more sensible mineral over which to fight. Indeed, the resource curse has become a far more important phenomenon in the twentieth and twenty-first century as the petroleum-fueled internal combustion engine has taken over as the main source of power for transport and manufacture from the coal-fired steam piston and the oat-fueled horse.
Until fairly recently the idea that minerals might be more trouble than they were worth might have struck many as odd. Few outside a coterie of development economists would have been familiar with the body of work on the "resource curse"—a blight with an agreeably piratical sound, like the Curse of the Black Pearl that dogs Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Now the pendulum of opinion has begun to swing. The corrupting power of mineral wealth has been shown graphically in movies like Blood Diamond, set in the civil war that raged in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and turned it into one of the most deprived nations on earth. When the Saddam Hussein regime fell in Baghdad, one of the first