Debt and the Environment

At first glance, it may seem like separate issues, but environment issues and poverty/debt are very much related. In fact, as Jubilee 2000 explains, it affects all of us. Basically, the more the developing countries stay in debt, the more they will feel that they need to milk the earth's resources for the hard cash they can bring in, and also cut back on social, health, environmental conservation, employment and other important programs.

In fact, even the World Wildlife Fund has started a campaign for the poor, acknowledging the link between poverty and environmental resource problems.

Brazil's IMF debt and financial problems have severely affected a project to save the Amazon rainforest.

And then there are many situations where the poor often have indigenous and traditional knowledge of their environment and are the best maintainers of it. However, when poverty has been imposed on them and international trade agreements force them to abandon their ways, much is lost. Indian activist and scientist, Vandana Shiva, for example, shows in her book Stolen Harvests (South End Press, 2000) that those who are often beneficial to the environment have been forced into poverty due to politics and economics such as concentrating land rights, pressure from industry to use the environment for other purposes or in other ways, etc. Industrialization is often to blame for losses in diversity. Excessive debt burden means that it becomes harder to sustain the environment.

Expensive aid and development programs from Europe have been found to be destroying parts of the environment in developing countries and affecting local and indigenous people into further poverty and misery. A lot of this is due to lack of consideration and communication with the people who are directly in the line of these development programs.

According to a Christian Aid report, industrialized nations should be owing over 600 billion dollars to the developing nations -- three times as much as the conventional debt that developing countries owe the developed ones.

Remember the Kyoto Conference On Climate Change? Washington (primarily) complained about the unfairness because developing nations did not have to reduce emissions like the developing nations were to do. Well, the report above, makes the point that many developing countries have also been trying to make; that the environmental consequences of the policies of industrialized nations have had a large, detrimental and costly effect on developing countries -- especially the poor in those countries, that are already burdened with debt. (For more about the Kyoto Conference, check out this site's section on Global Warming and Kyoto.)