State of the World 2001

The Challenge of a Globalizing World

The Worldwatch Institute

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781610916387
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy

From the thinning of the Arctic sea ice to the invasion of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, State of the World 2001 shows how the economic boom of the last decade has damaged natural systems. The increasingly visible evidence of environmental deterioration is only the tip of a much more dangerous problem: the growing inequities in wealth and income between countries and within countries, inequities that will generate enormous social unrest and pressure for change.

Chapter 1

Rich Planet, Poor Planet

Christopher Flavin

A visit to Brazil’s tropical state of Bahia provides contrasting views of the state of the world at the dawn of the new millennium. Bahia’s capital, Salvador, has a population of over 3 million and a thoroughly modern veneer. Its downtown is full of large office buildings and busy construction cranes, and its highways are crammed with sport utility vehicles. The state is also rich in natural resources: the wealth provided by gold and sugarcane made Salvador the obvious location for colonial Brazil’s leading port and capital for two centuries.¹

Once a backwater—slavery was not outlawed until the end of the nineteenth century, one of the last regions to ban this practice—Bahia’s economy is now booming. The state has a prospering manufacturing sector and has become popular with many leading multinationals, including automobile companies that have put some of their most advanced factories there. The information economy is in a particularly competitive frenzy. Brazilian Internet service providers are connecting customers for free, and cell phones appear to be almost as common as they are in many European cities.

Scratch the surface, however, and another Bahia is still there. The large favelas that ring Salvador’s outskirts are crowded with thousands of poor people who lack more than cell phones and computers: toilets, running water, and schoolbooks are among the basic services and products that are unavailable to many of Bahia’s poor. Similar gaps can be seen in the low hills that run south of Salvador along Bahia’s rugged coast: the collapse of many of the country’s rich cacao farms due to a devastating pathogen called witches’-broom and a sharp decline in world chocolate prices have left thousands of farm workers jobless and unable to provide for their families.

Bahia’s environmental condition is just as uneven. Considered by ecologists to be one of the world’s biological “hot spots,” the Atlantic Rain Forest covers more than 2,000 kilometers of Brazil’s subtropical coast. In 1993, biologists working in an area south of Salvador identified a world record 450 tree species in a single hectare. (A hectare of forest in the northeastern United States typically contains 10 species.) In the last decade, Bahia’s political and business leaders have come to recognize the extraordinary richness of their biological heritage—wildlands are being protected, ecological research facilities are being set up, and ecotourist resorts are mushrooming. A sign at the airport even warns travelers that removing endemic species from the country is a felony.²

And yet, signs of destruction are everywhere: cattle ranches sprawl where the world’s richest forests once stood; 93 percent of the Atlantic forest is already gone, and much of the remainder is fragmented into tiny plots. Pressure on these last bits of forest is enormous—both from powerful landowners and corporations eager to sell forest and agricultural products in the global marketplace, and from poor families desperately seeking a living.³

This picture of Bahia in the year 2000 is replicated at scores of locations around the globe. It is the picture of a world undergoing extraordinarily rapid change amid huge and widening disparities. Unprecedented economic prosperity, the emergence of democratic institutions in many countries, and the near instantaneous flow of information and ideas throughout a newly interconnected world allow us to address challenges that have been neglected for decades: meeting the material needs of all 6 billion members of the human race, and restoring a sustainable balance between humanity and Earth’s ecological systems.

This moment is historic, perhaps even evolutionary, in character. Tragically, it is not being seized. Despite a surge in economic growth in recent years and significant gains in health and education levels in many developing nations, the number of people who survive on less than $1 of income per day—the poverty threshold used by the World Bank—was 1.2 billion in 1998, almost unchanged since 1990. In some parts of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union, the number living in poverty is substantially higher than the figures recorded a decade ago.⁴

The struggle to restore the planet’s ecological health presents a similar picture: a number of small battles have been won, but the war itself is still being lost. Double-digit rates of growth in renewable energy markets, plus a two-year decline in global carbon emissions, for example, have failed to slow the rate of global climate change. Indeed, recent evidence, from the rapid melting of glaciers and the declining health of heat-sensitive coral reefs, suggests that climate change is accelerating. The same pattern can be seen in the increased commitment to protection of wild areas and biological diversity: new laws are being passed, consumers are demanding ecofriendly wood products, and eco-tourist resorts are sprouting almost as quickly as dot-com companies. But foresters and biologists report that this host of encouraging developments has not reversed the massive loss of forests or the greatest extinction crisis the world has seen in 65 million years.⁵

Long considered distinct issues, consigned to separate government agencies, ecological and social problems are in fact tightly interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The burden of dirty air and water and of decimated natural resources invariably falls on the disadvantaged. And the poor, in turn, are often compelled to tear town down the last nearby tree or pollute the local stream in order to survive. Solving one problem without addressing the other is simply not feasible. In fact, poverty and environmental decline are both embedded deeply in today’s economic systems. Neither is a peripheral problem that can be considered in isolation. What is needed is what Eduardo Athayde, General Director of Bahia’s Atlantic Forest Open University, calls “econology,” a synthesis of ecology, sociology, and economics that can be used as the basis for creating an economy that is both socially and ecologically sustainable—the central challenge facing humanity as the new millennium begins.⁶

The challenge is made larger by the fact that it must be met simultaneously at national and global levels, requiring not only cooperation but partnership between North and South. Responsibility for the current health of the planet and its human inhabitants is shared unequally between rich and poor countries, but if these problems are to be resolved, the two groups of nations will need to bring their respective strengths and capabilities to bear. This will require a new form of globalization—one that goes beyond trade links and capital flows to strengthened political and social ties between governments and civil society.

A select group of large industrial and developing countries—a collection that can be called the E-9, given that they are key environmental as well as economic players—could have a central role in closing the North-South gap. Together, this group of countries accounts for 57 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of total economic output. (See Table 1-1.) This chapter uses data on these nine diverse countries and areas to illuminate key economic, social, and ecological trends. But this grouping has more than just analytical value. As argued at the end of the chapter, E-9 cooperation could be a key to achieving accelerated economic and environmental progress in the new century.⁷

Table 1-1. The E-9: A Population and Economic Profile

Country or Grouping	Population 2000	Gross National Product, 1998
	(million)	(billion dollars)
China	1,265	924
India	1,002	427
European Union^1	375	8,312
United States	276	7,903
Indonesia	212	131
Brazil	170	768
Russia	145	332
Japan	127	4,089
South Africa	43	137

¹Data for European Union do not include Luxembourg.

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2000 (Washington, DC: 2000), 10-12; Population Reference Bureau, “2000 World Population Data Sheet,” wall chart (Washington, DC: June 2000).

A Tale of Two Worlds

Halfway through the year 2000, two stories from the Philippines made headlines around the world. In June, a computer virus dubbed the “love bug” appeared almost simultaneously on every continent, crashing the computer systems of scores of multinational corporations and government offices, ranging from the U.S. Pentagon to the British Parliament. The estimated total cost of the resulting disruptions: $10 billion. Computer security experts and FBI agents quickly traced the diabolical love bug to a small Manila technical college and a 24-year-old student named Onel de Guzman. For computer experts, this may have been an indication of the vulnerability of the global Internet, but in the Philippines it quickly became a source of national pride. People took the love bug debacle as an encouraging sign that their developing nation was leapfrogging into the top ranks of the global economy’s hottest sector.⁸

Economic successes and social failures are found side by side around the world in this supposed time of plenty.

Across town, a Manila neighborhood called the Promised Land was hit by a different kind of news a month later: more than 200 people were killed in a massive landslide and subsequent fire. Although this tragedy was precipitated by Typhoon Kai-Tak, it was anything but a natural disaster. The Promised Land, it turns out, is a combination garbage dump/shantytown that is home to 50,000 people, most of whom make their living by scavenging the food and materials discarded by Manila’s growing middle class. When two days of heavy rain loosened the mountain of garbage, it came crashing down on hundreds of homes as well as the dump’s electrical lines, starting a massive fire. Scores of Promised Land residents were buried, others were burned alive, and still more were poisoned by toxic chemicals released by the fire.⁹

Economic successes and social failures are now found side by side, not just in the Philippines, but around the world in this supposed time of plenty. The annual output of the world economy has grown from $31 trillion in 1990 to $42 trillion in 2000; by comparison, the total output of the world economy in 1950 was just $6.3 trillion. And in 2000, the growth of the world economy surged to a 4.7-percent annual rate, the highest in the last decade. This increase in economic activity has allowed billions of people to buy new refrigerators, televisions, and computers, and has created millions of jobs. Global telephone connections grew from 520 million in 1990 to 844 million in 1998 (an increase of 62 percent), and mobile phone subscribers went from 11 million to 319 million in that time (up 2,800 percent). The number of “host” computers, a measure of the Internet’s expansion, grew from 376,000 in 1990 to 72,398,000 in 1999—an increase of 19,100 percent.¹⁰

The economic boom of the last decade has not been confined to the rich countries of the North. Much of the growth is occurring in the developing nations of Asia and Latin America, where economic reforms, lowered trade barriers, and a surge in foreign capital have fueled investment and consumption. Between 1990 and 1998, Brazil’s economy grew 30 percent, India’s expanded 60 percent, and China...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• 1. Rich Planet, Poor Planet, Christopher Flavin
• 2. Uncovering Groundwater Pollution, Payal Sampat
• 3. Eradicating Hunger: A Growing Challenge, Lester R. Brown
• 4. Deciphering Amphibian Declines, Ashley Mattoon
• 5. Decarbonizing the Energy Economy, Seth Dunn
• 6. Making Better Transportation Choices, Molly O’Meara Sheehan
• 7. Averting Unnatural Disasters, Janet N. Abramovitz
• 8. Ending the Debt Crisis, David Malin Roodman
• 9. Controlling International, Hilary French and Lisa Mastny
• 10. Accelerating the Shift to Sustainability, Gary Gardner
• Notes
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