Download - Chicken Little Strikes Again?
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Chicken Little Strikes Again?Author(s): Henry H. Webster and James Gustave SpethSource: Foreign Policy, No. 133 (Nov. - Dec., 2002), pp. 14+16Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3183542 .
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Letters
"bureaucracy," as Easterly alleges without substantiation.
Finally, I confess a deep person- al regret that more is not done for the poor. But I would remind Easterly, and your readers, that the world would be worse off without the work of the international aid institutions.
-EMIL RUDERFER
Washington, D.C.
William Easterly Replies: John Marsh seems a little upset. Unfortunately, it's not clear exactly where he disagrees with my article. He should address his concerns about treating Africa as an undifferentiated unit to the aid agencies he is defend- ing since they invest so little in the kind of detailed local country knowl- edge he seems to be advocating (which I agree should be remedied).
The only tangible disagreement with my article I could find amongst the heated verbiage is Marsh's claim that the IMF is not a development agency, echoing the official line the IMF itself has long taken. This claim is wearing a little thin after the IMF's repeated financing of some poor countries, such as the 13 loans the IMF has made to Kenya over the last quarter century. The latest of these loans, given in 2000, was called a Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, which sounds a lot like development.
Emil Ruderfer wants more evi- dence but doesn't say which of the many pieces of evidence I offered was unsatisfactory. Nor is the kind of evidence he advances for his own counterclaims persuasive. It is not enough to repeat aid agency slogans on the ideals of poverty reduction and citizen participation to prove their effectiveness at achieving those ideals. Believing that "poor people ... have a voice in development projects through
their elected officials in [the aid] institutions" takes faith beyond my own spiritual capacity. Does Rud- erfer really believe that poor people have a voice in the many tyrannies around the developing world? Developing countries might send appointees to Washington to serve on boards of aid agencies, but rich countries outvote poor countries on those boards. And those boards often only rubber-stamp whatever the bureaucracy puts forward.
Ruderfer and Marsh want us all to take aid agency PR as reality. Instead, I prefer to offer, as evi- dence for bureaucracy run amok in foreign aid, the actual outcomes in the bureaucratic process and in poor countries.
Chicken Little Strikes Again? James Gustave Speth's article, "Recycling Environmentalism" (July/August 2002), represents the latest chapter in a cyclical pattern in Speth's thinking.
As the principal author of "Global 2000 Report to the Presi- dent" some 20 years ago, Speth claimed the sky was falling--that the Earth's resources were quickly being depleted and that the envi- ronment was in great danger. In the mid-1980s, he changed his tune when he organized and helped write The Global Possible, which was quite hopeful concerning resource and environmental matters. But now the sky seems to be falling again.
It's difficult to know what accounts for Speth's thought pattern. His failure to be explicit about a pro- nounced difference between devel- oped and developing parts of the world may be a contributing factor. Many (perhaps most) resource and environmental conditions are rela- tively good and improving in devel-
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Letters
oped countries, as has been well doc- umented by knowledgeable sources. These conditions are far less favor- able in developing nations, primari- ly for reasons of poverty, as Speth mentions. Making this distinction is the key to effectively doing some- thing about resource and environ- mental conditions in the developing world. Only when developed coun- tries stop imitating Chicken Little will they be able to help their devel- oping neighbors.
-HENRY H. WEBSTER Research Associate Emeritus
University of Minnesota St. Paul, Minn.
James Gustave Speth Replies: I'm afraid the sky has been falling the whole time. The Carter admin- istration's 1980 "Global 2000 Report" was a straightforward effort to project what might happen
by 2000 if societies did little to respond to large-scale environmen- tal and resource challenges. The World Resources Institute's Global Possible conference and publica- tions concluded that a gloomy future was not inevitable and sought to provide guidance on how to meet the challenges identified in "Global 2000." That many of the distressing projections of "Global 2000" came to pass simply proves that societies have failed to mount adequate responsive efforts.
Henry Webster is correct that domestic environmental conditions in industrial countries are, by many indicators, much improved and that the worst examples of both resource loss and industrial pollution are found today in developing coun- tries. But this analysis overlooks the numerous ways that industrial countries are threatening the glob- al environment and contributing
directly and indirectly to the devel- oping world's problems.
The United States began the war on pollution (in 1970 with the Clean Air Act). It is difficult to know what happened to the commitment that was so evident then; but I sus- pect it has something to do with the fact that the United States addressed acute, obvious, and local pollution insults with some success, thereby creating the illusion that the prob- lem is solved. But Americans mere- ly created a fool's paradise for themselves, for the more serious pollution problems are chronic, insidious, and global.
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