Post-Copenhagen, Poverty Equals Opportunity for Third World Nations
I divide my time between the Caribbean and Britain. When you have the option of endless summer, the predictable grey of London may seem an odd thing to look forward to. But my island in the sun (as opposed to my other soggy, snowy island) is struggling through a long drought. We have bee reduced to queuing for showers and washing clothes in water gathered from garden hoses.
Imagine a backed up toilet in 30-degree temperatures and 90% humidity: yells of “Don’t flush!” because someone has only pissed, and you sure as hell can’t bother to carry buckets of water through the house just for that. Long showers never felt so good as when I arrived back in London, settling to fill the kettle as full as I bloody well like.
Such a contrast reveals a major fault line dividing rich and poor societies; in the ‘South’, we still live largely at the mercy of nature. In rich countries, we’ve tamed it. El Nino is the proximate cause of the Caribbean’s woes, but the fundamental cause is a degraded infrastructure resulting from decades of underinvestment – pretty much par for the course in a poor country.
In a country like Jamaica, you always feel like you’re walking on a cliff-edge: come a hurricane or a Pacific weather pattern, you get pushed over.
But this precariousness may not last forever. When Hopenhagen morphed into Nopenhagen last month, pessimists groaned that the lands which will suffer most from climate change are those which did the least to cause it – that is, poor, tropical ones. But optimists insist the Copenhagen summit merely postponed the inevitable. They argue that sooner or later we’ll have no choice but to agree a global carbon-emission regime.
When that happens, the very poverty of the Third World will become an asset. The same underdevelopment which leaves a poor country praying for rain, leaves it with a lot of what economists call unused capacity. In this case, call it pollution capacity. Unused wildlife resources can be cordoned off and sold for offsets, and the returns on renewable energy will be much greater in poor countries, simply because the infrastructure must be largely created anew: opportunities aplenty, lads.
We may well be sitting on the cusp of a great wave of new investment in developing countries. The hiatus, as the world community regroups to try and forge a new regime, could be used by adventurous entrepreneurs to get ready for it.
Come they will. And that will pose a challenge for Third World governments. As Mike Smith noted in his recent feature on farmland in developing nations, easy-come doesn’t always mean easy-go.
Posted by John Rapley in Green Rush | January 20, 2010 2:55PM |