False Economy - Alan Beattie [65]
The review ended up recommending that the Bank phase out funding coal and oil projects altogether. Given the influence of the United States and the EU over the World Bank, and the importance of American and European oil companies, together with pressure from developing-country governments for the Bank to remain involved, that recommendation was never going to be adopted by the Bank's management. But it reflected views expressed in a series of heated discussions at regional forums. Many development campaigners and academics argued that there could not be sufficient guarantees that the resource curse could be overcome. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that extractives could systematically be relied upon to enrich the poor.
You can easily say what policies need to be followed. But unless you have the institutions to impose those policies and defend them, knowing the right policies is of limited value. And however it is that such institutions evolve, it is not easy to force them from the outside. Almost by definition, resource-rich governments very often find themselves powerful enough to avoid such attempts to influence them.
Western oil and mining companies are easier for NGOs and Western governments to go after. Requirements can be imposed on them by legislation, and they care about the potential risk to their reputations from being involved in disastrous projects, as they have found from becoming embroiled in the violent politics of Nigeria's delta region. But Western companies are not the only buyers in town. A big new player, China, has emerged, and it shows few signs of playing by the same rules.
While no Western company would openly pump oil out of Sudan, given the massacre in Darfur and assorted other human-rights abuses there, China has had no such scruples. Beijing offers the not unreasonable excuse that it is only doing what Western companies used to do before newfangled ideas like Publish What You Pay came along. In any case, Beijing argues, with some justification, that it is forced into difficult countries because most of the existing oil sources have already been stitched up by the United States and Europe.
In Steinbeck's The Pearl, after they have been attacked in the night, but before their son has been killed, Kino's wife pleads with him to throw it back in the sea. "This thing is evil," she cries. "This pearl is like a sin! It will destroy us. Throw it away, Kino. Let us break it between stones. Let us bury it and forget the place. ... It has brought evil." He refuses. "This is our one chance," he says. "Our son must go to school. He must break out of the pot that holds us in."
Kino ought to have been right. But he was not. Neither, most of the time, are the countries who find that a jewel that evokes envy, greed, and hatred turns out to be not a jewel beyond price but a jewel worth less than nothing.
Chapter 5. Religion: Why Don't Islamic Countries Get Rich?
The idea that Islamic countries fail to get rich became a staple concern of the international commentariat after the September 11 attacks on the United States. The hijackers came from affluent families in a relatively well-off country, Saudi Arabia. But economic and state failure in Muslim Afghanistan had provided a headquarters for al-Qaeda, the fundamentalist organization that directed them. And the apparent lack of jobs and opportunities in the Islamic world, creating potential armies of angry young men, gave new resonance to an old concern.
But Afghanistan is, to be sure, an extreme example—and in the recent past