National 5 (Spotlight Weekly)

Development with Dignity

The latest report by the World Bank offers prescription for sustainable development

By A CORRESPONDENT

How would 2052 look like? In the next 50 years, the world could have a gross domestic product of $140 trillion and a total population of nine billion people, up from six billion today. Without better policies and institutions, social and environmental strains may derail development progress, leading to higher poverty levels and a decline in the quality of life for everybody, says the World Development Report (WDR) 2003 published by the World Bank last week.

According to the WDR, the next 50 years could see a fourfold increase in the size of the global economy and significant reductions in poverty, provided that governments act now to avert a growing risk of severe damage to the environment and profound social unrest.

Ahead of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg that kicked off Monday, the World Bank has called upon heads of state, ministers, private sector leaders, and civil society representatives to reach into an agreement on steps that could be taken now to ensure that poverty-reducing growth does not come at great cost to future generations.

The World Development Report 2003 suggests new alliances are needed at the local, national, and global levels to better address these problems. The burden for development must be shared more widely. Rich countries must further open their markets and cut agricultural subsidies that depress incomes of third-world farmers, and they must increase the flow of aid, medicines, and new technologies to developing countries. Governments in the developing world, in turn, must become more accountable and transparent, and ensure that poor people are able to obtain secure land tenure, as well as access to education, health care, and other basic services. In the state of West Bengal, India, the share of crop output increased from 50 percent to 75 percent when the a new state government administration stressed a law giving security of tenure to the sharecroppers. As a result, annual growth in the production of food grains in West Bengal rose from 0.4 percent to 5.1 percent, while elsewhere in India, they rose only from 1.9 percent to 3.1 percent.

"Low income countries will need to grow at 3.6 percent per capita to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015, but this growth must be achieved in a manner that preserves our future," said Ian Johnson, Vice President of the World Bank's Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development Network.

Coordinating globally and acting locally will be critical to ensuring that gains in social indicators — such as incomes, literacy rates, or access to sanitation — of the past 20 years are not reversed by population growth pressures and unsustainable economic expansion, said the Report.

And, the challenges are daunting. The average income in the richest 20 countries is already 37 times that in the poorest 20 nations. In South Asia, 330 million people, or nearly one quarter of the 1.3 billion people globally, live on fragile lands — arid zones, slopes, wetlands, and forests — that cannot sustain them. Both the gap between rich and poor countries and the number of people living on fragile lands have doubled in the past 40 years.

Since the 1950s, nearly two million hectares of land worldwide — representing 23 percent of all cropland, pastures, forest, and woodland — have been degraded, and tropical forests are disappearing at the rate of five percent a decade.

More than a third of terrestrial biodiversity is squeezed into habitats that altogether represent just 1.4 percent of the Earth's surface.

"In the next 50 years, the world's population will begin to stabilize and the majority of people will live in cities for the first time in history," said Zmarak Shalizi, lead author of the WDR 2003. "By thinking long term and acting now, we can take advantage of these windows of opportunity to shift development to a more inclusive and sustainable path, and achieve steep reductions in poverty in the decades ahead."

The WDR 2003 suggests that sustainable development will require:

Achieving substantial growth in income and productivity in developing countries.

Managing the social, economic, and environmental transitions to a predominantly urban world.

Attending to the needs of hundreds of millions of people living on environmentally fragile lands.

Reaping the "demographic dividends" seen in declining dependency rates and slowing population growth.

And avoiding the social and environmental stresses — at local and global levels — likely to emerge on the path to a $140 trillion world economy.

Across the developing world, new rules, organizations, and other institutional innovations are already leading to better environmental outcomes. All but a handful of countries have eliminated lead from gasoline. In the past 10 years, the percentage of people in low- and middle-income countries with access to sanitation has climbed to 52 percent, from 44 percent.

Most importantly, poor people must have a greater say in the process that will shape their lives in the decades ahead. Decisions need to be taken in an inclusive and consultative manner that recognizes the views of poor people while also empowering them with greater control of their own resources, said the Report.