Abstract

Destructive 'Development': Financing Ecocide in the Third World

The article describes a chapter of the forthcoming book "A Fate Worse Than Debt," by Susan George which is about the Third World debt crisis. Indebted countries have not just borrowed money; they have borrowed the future. Nature puts up the collateral. The environment is perhaps an unexpected victim of the debt crisis in the Third World, but one day people shall all pay for the damage this crisis does to ecosystems. Many neoclassical economists still flatly deny even the theoretical possibility of limits to growth and refuse the notion that pollution and environmental destruction should figure in their equations. Anything difficult to quantify simply gets left out. Since the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are peopled with neoclassical economists, it is not surprising that their loans and adjustment programs pay scant attention to ecological costs. It will be a long time before anyone can fully estimate exactly what those are-and by then it may well be too late.