Few terms, these days, evoke so much disagreement and rancour as does the word "development." Every economist, environmentalist, sociologist, anthropologist and you-say-who differs in his or her interpretation of what "development" means. Delve a little deeper, and the debate becomes one of what "development" should entail. Arguments continue, differences persist. How sustainable is development too transforms into another contention about my theory of development being more sustainable than yours. Given this backdrop, Norman Myers of Green College, Oxford, makes a point in his preface describing development being something that the developed nations keep telling developing countries to get on with.
Crump and Ellwood's compilation steers clear of sweeping statements and prejudiced definitions and tries to leave the onus of the passing the judgment to the reader. The two have chosen a simplistic way of going about making sense of "development". For one, the book is, as is evident from the title, in the form of a dictionary-encyclopaedia. The 624 entries comprise the key indices of development and the key players (countries, organisations and individuals). The entries are succinct, and buttressed with supporting data. On the whole, the authoes present a comprehensive overview of the main ideas and issues of concern to social activists and nongovernmental organisations involved with Third World Development.
The two do not try to explain inexplicable terms - "development" itself, for instance. The elements are discussed threadbare, albeit laconically. Intrinsic factors meaning elements of "development" are neither left out nor dealt with disdain or bias in terms of the words/space devoted to them. Crump and Ellwood handle the issues sensitively and sensibly. They understand how thorny and delicate issues are. So, they describe what the trees are like, and the reader ends up knowing what the forest is all about.
Myers, for his part, raises important issues. He questions the parameters of development. The United Kingdom, he argues, likes to think its economy has been steadily expanding for years. In conventional terms it has - per capita gross national product (GNP) has been climbing steadily, occasional blips apart, for a full half century. But a look at the net economic growth (NEG), also known as sustainable economic welfare, one finds that it peaked in the early Seventies and has been declining since 1980. The NEG is economic growth with deductions made for environmental problems and other downside factors. When an oil spill is cleaned up, the many activities involved are counted as economic endeavours just as worthy as growing food or educating children. Myers finds it absurd to add them to the GNP when they should be deducted in the first place but are not.
The same applies to many social ills. If one is mugged, the costs of police help, plus possibly medical care, court activities and even imprisonment for the offender are all reckoned to be improvements to the economy. Therefore, as muggings increase, so does the GNP. Myers cites the instance of a financial whiz in Japan calculating that the Kobe earthquake was marginally good for the country's economy. In the past quarter of a century, the British economy has expanded by one and half times but road traffic has doubled, the incidence of asthma has tripled, the number of workless households has tripled as well, and violent crime has quadrupled.
Brazil has a per capita GNP of $3,640 but the life expectancy is 67, and its average family size is 2.4 children. Sri Lanka, with a much more social and egalitarian cast to its economic system, has figures of $700, 73 and 2.3. Take the case of India, on the other hand. Between 1975 and 1995, its gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled, while industrial pollution increased four times and industrial pollution multiplied as many as eight times. Despite the fact that India is just beginning to actually industrialise. The cost of death and disease due to environmental degradation remains unaccounted for.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has assembled a set of criteria by which to measure "human development", including health, education, income/employment, women's status, social security, social fabric and environment (the UNDP's Human Development Report for 1999 was released recently). According to this human development index (HDI), Saudi Arabia with is autocratic and anti-democratic regime and abysmal human rights track record ranks 73rd, by contrast of its per capita GDP standing of 41st. Most oil-rich Arab countries are similarly placed. The United States (US) ranks 4th according to the HDI, and 3rd according to the other. Switzerland shows the most yawning gap among the industrialised nations - 16th and 4th. The country topping the HDI is Canada, which ranks 7th on the GDP index. The fact that comes across is that wealth and well-being are not the same thing.
Crump and Ellwood provide other startling and stark facts as well. The rich world has a glut of food and obese citizens. In the US about a third of the population is overweight. More than $33 billion is spent by these people alone every year in often-vain attempts to lose weight. In contrast, in the poor world, millions subsist on an amount of food that is simply inadequate for good health. An estimated 190 million children under the age of five are chronically malnourished. Since 1900, the value of goods and services produced each year has risen 20-fold and the use of energy 30-fold. The difference between the rich and the poor continues to widen. There are 200 billionaires and 3 million millionaires in the world. But 100 million people are homeless and 1 billion people live in abject poverty.
Entries are looked at, in many cases, from all possible points of view. The one on biological diversity, for example, at one stage mentions the passenger pigeon flocks of which were last seen in 1889 darkening the skies of eastern North America, recorded in groups three to four miles wide. Sheer population size, the authors note, was no insurance against extinction. On the other hand, the Irish peasants' dependence on one potato variety made them vulnerable to the blight which devastated the potato crops in the 1840s. Many died and many more migrated to England and America.
Thankfully, the assertions made are not condescending towards developing nations. From the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Genital Mutilation and the Chipko Movement to the Mau Mau, the Narmada movement and Cultural Revolution, they all find worthy mention. The individual entries too do not seem like a roll of honour prepared by international funding agencies. They are all there. From Karl Marx and Norman Borlaug to Thomas Malthus and Margaret Mead to Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet and Dag Hammarskjold to Willy Brandt and Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein and Bob Geldof to Dalai Lama. While there will always be an argument about who was left out and who should not have been in, the entries about individuals are not a ranking of their contributions to development. If the idea is to cover a range of issues and ideas, the authors do it well.
For the uninitiated, this book proves a good starting point. Issues are raised and points of contention thrown up for those interested and keen to follow up in other avenues. It is not meant for the experts, who, in any case, have written and can write volumes about development. But even for many experts, reading this book can be a come-back-down-to-earth experience, for a change, though. The issue of development needs to be simplified. Those keeping track of the proceedings of the Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) will know. This is the hallmark of Crump and Ellwood's compendium - it is simple, lucid and easy to follow. The memories of underdevelopment may soon be a black and white nightmare.
