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1、Fair shares in a world of limits: the new front line for international developmentPresentation to WWF / Oxfam seminar on scarcity, fair shares and development, 19 July 2011Alex EvansIn case you havent had a chance to read the paper, heres the argument in one sentence: As the 21st century global econ
2、omy hits natural resource limits and planetary boundaries, fundamental questions about fair shares will start to arise and these questions will increasingly come to be seen as the new front line for international development. All of us here are aware that demand for resources of all kinds especially
3、 food, oil, land, water and carbon space for greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is growing exponentially. Thats just a logical consequence of the worlds population continuing to grow, and the global middle class becoming larger and more affluent. And were also aware that even as demand grows
4、, supply is in many cases struggling to keep up. The yield gains of the agricultural Green Revolution are running out of steam. Competition for land and water is intensifying between farmers and pastoralists, food and fuel, urban and rural. Investment in new oil production is inadequate to meet futu
5、re demand, according to the International Energy Agency, even before peak oil is taken into account. Carbon space is acutely limited if the world is to limit global warming to anything close to two degrees Celsius.More broadly, were increasingly aware of planetary limits of other kinds. Johan Rockst
6、roms work at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which highlights nine key planetary boundaries from the nitrogen cycle to stratospheric ozone and from chemical pollution to biodiversity, has become extremely topical. And it puts the issue of limits on the table in perhaps less polarising fashion than
7、debates about limits to economic growth. Now to be clear: recognising that limits exist in the real world does not mean that were stuck in some deterministic nightmare in which were doomed to end up in a neo-Malthusian tragedy of the commons. On the contrary, I think we can be confident that markets
8、 will adapt and that technological innovations will emerge as they always do. But that process of transition will take time. It will need to overcome inertia, market failures, externalised costs and perverse subsidies. And until its complete, poor people and poor countries risk losing access to reso
9、urces that they depend on for their basic needs. And so any discussion of limits is also, inevitably, a discussion about fair shares. Now this is not merely hypothetical. We need only look around us at the issues were all already confronting in our work. Within many fragile states, disputes over acc
10、ess to land and water are becoming intense. In the process, theyre multiplying the threat of violent conflict. We saw that in Darfur from 2003 to 2010 and in the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008. And we see it today in insurgencies in rural India, and in the violence currently taking place in
11、 the Horn of Africa. Internationally, the trend of landgrabs has seen 80m hectares (an area considerably larger than France) acquired in deals since 2001, with poor people all too often displaced from communal lands as a result. The same theme can be seen offshore too, for instance in EU trawler fle
12、ets snapping up fishing rights off Senegal. Or take food price inflation. Whether its structural drivers like the US now diverting 40% of its corn crop to biofuels and millions more consumers shifting to resource-intensive western diets or amplifiers like export bans or futures speculation, the impa
13、ct is that food prices are soaring in the process, slipping out of reach of many of the worlds poorest. Or look at energy. Spiralling oil prices risk are squeezing poor, import-dependent countries out of the market: between 2004 and 2007, over a dozen African countries spent more on oil imports than
14、 they received in aid and debt relief. And in the worlds mushrooming cities, electrical load-shedding and brownouts tend to see poor consumers lose out most, if indeed they have access to electricity at all; 1.4 billion of them dont.Across all these examples, its the same underlying dynamic. When ov
15、erall global consumption levels start to reach limits, its poor people who risk getting left without chairs when the music stops. And with supply and demand balances for key resources set to tighten still further, these examples are just trailers for forthcoming attractions. So how should aid donors
16、, campaigners, think tankers and others of us working in international development react?Well first and most fundamentally, I think we need to be out there making the argument about why resource and environmental limits are so central to development. The examples I listed a moment ago are the thin end of a very thick wedge. On top of them are amplifying factors like the low adaptive capacity of the p
