[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, November 7, 1995
.1536 
[Translation]
The Chairman: I am pleased to welcome today Mr. Ismail Serageldin, Vice-President for Environmental Sustainable Development at the World Bank.
He is a graduate of Cairo University, and obtained his doctorate from Harvard.
He has written many works on economic development, on human resource-related questions, on the environment and other subjects. His most recent book is: Nurturing Development: Aid in Cooperation in Today's Changing World.
Mr. Ismail Serageldin (Vice-President for Environmentally Sustainable Development at the World Bank): Thank you Mr. Chairman. Members of the Committee, I am honoured to appear here and pleased to make a presentation to you. So as to cover a number of subjects very quickly, I shall be using slides.
I shall be speaking both in French and English. I don't know exactly how that will go. While I might cover one area in English, I shall nevertheless be very pleased to switch to French to discuss any issues or questions you might want to raise.
Mr. Chairman,
[English]
ladies and gentlemen, we want to talk about people-centred sustainable development, both ideas and actions.
[Translation]
There are three major challenge facing the world. The first concerns population demographic growth and urbanization.
[English]
Please remember that the urban growth in India alone over the next generation will be more than double the populations of U.K., Germany and France combined. The cities already look like that.
[Translation]
The second challenge concerns food security.
[English]
Food security is a big challenge - how to double food production in one generation without reliance on chemical additives.
Third is better management of our natural resources, which we have not done a very good job of dealing with so far.
These three challenges translate into the fact that we need to produce differently not less in order to cope with these needs. It's not a matter of reducing production; it's a matter of doing it differently.
What has the World Bank been doing? It has had a fourfold agenda since Rio. First is to do no harm and mitigate damage of potential projects we finance. Second is to help our countries with environmental projects. Third is to exploit win-win. Fourth is to deal with global environmental problems.
To do no harm means we do environmental assessments of every single project and look at resettlement and social issues. We will continue to finance roads and dams but we will not do so in the manner in which it was done in the past. We will take into account all these measures that were not adequately addressed in the past. So these kinds of insensitive projects will now become sensitive or they will not be done at all.
The next item is to target environmental assistance to client countries. The World Bank, it may surprise you to know, is the world's largest financier of environmental projects in developing countries. It has a portfolio of $10 billion with 137 projects in 62 countries and growing. This represents a total project cost - this is $10 billion of bank money - of $22 billion.
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The idea is not to just do environmental projects that deal with air pollution and so on, but to exploit the positive win-win synergies between development and the environment. This really falls into two parts: investing in people and efficient management of resources.
If we invest in people primarily, we're all winners. That is at the heart of everything we do, whether it's population policy or the empowerment of women. As you can see from this Jamaican poster, they are the major vectors for social change, and the most important thing is education for women.
The World Bank today is the largest financier of education projects in the world, with $2 billion invested, of which $900 million are devoted to increasing female participation. Another $1 billion per year is spent on health of the population and nutrition, and we want to double that investment in human resources over the next five years.
Efficient management of resources is important. For example, energy subsidies are environmentally unsound and economically unsound. They represent, in fact, $230 billion in 1990 in the developing countries, including eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This was four to five times the total flow of official development assistance from the north to the south. Redressing these subsidies - they have now come down quite considerably to about $170 billion, $160 billion since 1990 - is environmentally sound and economically sound.
We are addressing global environmental problems where the benefits are global and the costs are local. These include global warming, ozone depletion, biodiversity, and pollution of international waters. We do this primarily through support of the global environmental facility. We are one of the three implementing agencies and implement about half the projects there.
More important than these specific actions is the greening of the entire portfolio of the World Bank. To succeed in that, we're not just putting $1 billion or $2 billion per year into the environment. The entire $22 billion that the World Bank provides in support will become environmentally friendly. Already about two-thirds of the portfolio can be so qualified. That will enable us to think in terms of committing $200 billion for such projects over the next 10 to 15 years.
With government contributions co-financing, this is almost half a trillion dollars of investment that can be environmentally and socially friendly, and therefore will become a major force for environmentally sustainable development. That is one of the comparative advantages of the bank.
Through its dialogue, technical standards and studies, the bank can also influence more than the projects it finances directly itself. To do so, however, we need much closer partnerships with all other actors, including the civil society, other donors, the private sector, national governments and the like. Therefore partnerships have become a major theme of the new president of the bank, myself, and others who are pushing in that direction.
What is environmentally sustainable development? The World Bank is doing a lot of methodological and analytical work that is at the cutting edge in changing and challenging conventional wisdom. Everybody starts with the Brundtland definition, which is to meet the needs of the present without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The word ``needs'' is a problem. It is clear-cut for the hungry and the starving in Africa, but for the average family that already has two cars and three televisions, what does it mean when we say ``needs''? Yet those families will represent 80% of the world's consumption next year, so that's not an operational definition.
At the bank we adopted a triangle and every project has to be tested for economic sustainability, ecological sustainability and social sustainability. It's very important to realize that in one section we're talking about economics and finance; in the next section we're talking about the natural sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry; but in the last section where we're talking about equity, social cohesion, participation and cultural identity, that is where it counts. If you do not have social sustainability, as we have seen from Rwanda through Yugoslavia, you cannot talk about either economic growth or ecological sustainability.
We have not integrated these yet, but in the work I have distributed to you today we have now rethought this as giving future generations opportunities - as many, if not more, opportunities than we've had ourselves. This is almost the Brundtland definition but slightly different. Opportunity has a way of being measured; it is really capital, and this is capital per person to take into account the growth of population.
This enables us to go back and revisit this diagram and say that economic sustainability really translates into protecting man-made capital investment. We can extend this argument to natural capital as well. We can extend this capital further to social sustainability.
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Here we have two kinds of capital. Human capital is health, education, and nutrition associated with an individual. Social capital includes the institutions of society that enable a society to function as a whole more effectively from the rule of law to a shared structure of mediation.
Therefore, we can say that sustainability means that we increase the total share of capital over time, excepting some change in the composition of the four components.
This gives us opportunity, therefore, to say that it does make sense to draw down a barrel of oil from the ground and invest in educating little girls. Some substitution is possible, but you can't think of any of these being driven to zero and having something exist. So they're also complements.
That's our first conclusion, which is that they are both partially substitutes and partially complements, and the mix can change over time.
This is very important, because we have to address the issue of capital and wealth, which leads us to another major problem in the way governments are managed in nations today. No company would think of managing itself exclusively on cashflow and income statements; they would want to see a balance sheet. Yet we don't have a balance sheet for nations. So we can construct a balance sheet that has these four kinds of capital and liabilities and come up with the net worth.
We did this at the World Bank for 192 countries. The conclusion is that it is important to do this in order to bring a complement to the analysis of stocks and analysis of flows, like companies.
We ran into physical measurement issues and pricing issues in dealing with the methodology, but we made the first approximation. We talked about physical capital and man-made capital, which is basically buildings, equipment, roads, etc., all of that.
We then looked at natural capital, human capital investment in people and social capital, which is the sense of community and the glue that holds society together. We did not disentangle the other two.
Here is the result of the study. As you can see, standing result number one is that produced assets, which everybody focuses on as investment, never accounts for 20% of the wealth. The real wealth of nations is in the human and social side, even among developing countries, but more so among the rich countries.
This, therefore, leads us to the first and standing conclusion that the bulk of wealth is in human and social capital. Therefore, people, instead of refining the 20% measurement, should invest in improving the 80% measurement.
Second, these produced assets account for less than 20%, regardless of the level of wealth, because they depreciate.
Third, investing in human capital is very important as a path for development.
We then got back from the wealth side to the flow or the income, and the greening of national income accounts. It does not make all that much difference when you look at the per capita income side. This is for all of Latin America.
These identical changes, once introduced on the investment and savings side, bring about dramatic results. This is the gross domestic investment, which is what economists look at. This is what we have called genuine savings. As you can see, it can tip either to the positive or the negative side.
More importantly, it raises a profound challenge to conventional thinking. If you draw a line like that you will find that these two points, which would read 18% of GNP in gross domestic investment, look identical to the conventional economic analysis. But, in fact, they have a net positive of 7% and a net negative of 3%. Therefore, we need to look at genuine savings, not just at the gross domestic investment that conventional measures look at.
This is new. The question will be asked immediately: how confident are we that this measure of genuine savings is measuring something real? Looked at by region, what we have here is for all the regions over a 25-year period. This is the Latin American one we're looking at now. The red one is sub-Saharan Africa. It shows negative saving since the mid-1970s. East Asia has been taking off since the early 1980s.
This is what we find when we visit those regions. Therefore, this measure of genuine saving is capturing something real. When you go to sub-Saharan Africa or east Asia, you do notice this difference.
So it gives me greater confidence that this measure is real. Therefore, this gives me my conclusion number four, which is that we cannot look only at gross domestic investment as GNP because it can mask real differences. The genuine saving - what we are adding to the stock of wealth for future generations - may be a good operational measure of sustainability. This is taking us in a new way, challenging the conventional thinking of what we do.
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All of this does not address the issue of inequities - inequities between countries. This famous champagne glass diagram that was done by UNDP in 1992 shows the richest 20% receiving 83% of the world's income and the poorest 20% receiving 1.4%. This is not captured in any of the statistics I've been discussing. Nor does it capture the true conditions of the privation and poverty that exist in the developing countries from a sociological or existential point of view. Nor does it capture the fact that we have rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries, including a rising urban underclass - the homeless and so on - in parts of the United States and other industrialized countries.
All of these issues of inequities are not adequately captured in these measures, and we need to change them. But in the meantime, while we are working on the frontiers of knowledge and measurement, which we think is going to be the foundation for the future, we have to improve our dealings with people on the ground. Primarily, if I had only one choice, I would say let's empower women. They're not only those who nurture the next generation, they are those who produce the bulk of the food in many parts of the world. They are also the ecosystem managers, and we know that by empowering them education is passed on.
For you parliamentarians it may be particularly relevant to note this graph from the World Bank's 1991 development report, which shows that countries perform best in educating their girls where they have more civil liberty, not less civil liberty. This is based on the Gastil index. The UNDP did similar studies using the Humana index, and the results are robust.
I've been talking about empowerment. What does it mean? It means reaching out to those who are most excluded in society - the remote, rural, smallholder farmer or sharecropper, and the urban underclass who live on the garbage heaps of the cities, whether it is Cairo, Lagos or Mexico City. It is the women and the children. It is the ethnic minorities, who in many countries are persecuted. It is increasingly refugees who have been displaced by civil strife and who are now receiving humanitarian assistance rather than development assistance, although we have to think of them as people as well. Empowering them is basically giving them access to land, credit, education, extension, and to have accountable governments that take this into account.
Empowerment means changing the way governments and technocrats have been thinking about issues. Let me give you a quick example from public housing to show you what disempowerment is and what empowerment is.
This is the hand of Le Corbusier designing, God-like, the future for the city, which people will have to fit into. In fact, this legitimated the slab-block approach to public housing which we see everywhere from Cairo in 1980 to Frankfurt in 1922 - or is it the other way around? Nobody can tell. But what we can say that it it creates these instant slums almost everywhere.
In St. Louis, United States, people had a choice. They were put to the question: what would they do? Here you see Pruitt Igoe. The people voted to dynamite it. And now Secretary Cisneros is systematically going through the projects in the United States and changing that approach. This is a condemnation of a social policy.
To show you what empowerment does, in this typical housing project in Cairo, Ain Al-Sira, people - for reasons I won't go into - felt empowered and felt that the project was their own. What did they do? First they tried to individualize their homes and paint them on the outside as well as the inside, saying ``this is mine''. Next they got together and agreed on building additions. Before you knew it, a sense of community was born and additions were being built everywhere. You can no longer see the original block anymore; the geometry of the block has disappeared. And what's more, you will note that some of these additions are of better quality than the original building, whose justification was supposedly due to the government saying that people could not build for themselves.
This is not just what happens in the big cities. It happens also in the poorest parts of the world. I will show you an example from absolutely the poorest people you can think of.
This is a refugee camp with nomads in Mauritania. After 14 years of drought they lost all their herds and came to live as refugees around Nouakchott and Rosso. This picture is from Rosso.
They are nomads; they had no building tradition. They spent their time waiting for water to be trucked in. They are incredibly poor, and as a result, because they have no building tradition, what they actually do succeed in doing is little packing crates with burlap and corrugated seats. That's what they do.
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But they have a strong sense of community, some sense of social solidarity. This person wanted to move his shack, so everybody pitched in and lifted it up and carried it to its new location.
What is important is not the poverty of the shack itself, or the inability to build, but the presence of that social solidarity.
See what happens when people come and bring them - as an NGO did - the one thing they lack, which is know-how about how to build. This is the same refugee camp, and here is the project I'm going to show you.
This was done basically by bringing in the expertise of engineers and architects to show them how to build with local materials. Look at what they are now able to build. Look at the sophistication of the structures they produced.
I would say that the elegance of the structure lies in not just how beautiful it is esthetically but in the sense of dignity it gives people in being able to build that, when beforehand all they could do was to build this. This is what empowerment is all about and this is what we have to recognize as the emerging civil society in the developing countries.
The civil society has been documented as being a fundamental part of the long-term development process. In Italy, Putnam showed that northern Italy out-performed southern Italy. But more importantly, he found that this correlated very closely with civicness - the presence of associative structures that are voluntarily and horizontally based. The question that emerged, therefore, was which is which? Is the north rich and therefore the people can spend their time communing with each other and drinking their cappuccino, or is it the other way around?
Because it was Italy, it had data for the 1900s, data for the 1970s, and then institutional performance that could be measured and tested. One hypothesis is that it is civic involvement that explains socio-economic development, and the other one is the opposite - that socio-economic development would explain it. Putnam tested all these relationships, and here was the finding: the overwhelming explanatory force is this one, and then this is second, this is third, and this is fourth. It is clear that civic involvement, civic performance, is the foundation for long-term sustainable growth.
In the absence of that, we confront social disintegration, where you see societies that are giving this kind of education to their people and putting their money into military activities, frequently with the result of disintegration. This is a picture of Beirut at the height of the civil war in Lebanon.
But this also is an award-winning picture - this is a Muslim groom and a Christian bride who together, hand in hand, are crossing the infamous green line that divided east from west Beirut, showing that human beings can reach over these barriers and recreate a new civil society.
So for us, therefore, who are in the development business, it means that we must encourage participation, for that is the glue that holds societies together. It means working with village organizations, with fishermen's groups, with herders' associations, with all forms of participation that enable people to discuss and make decisions about their future. That requires governments that are transparent, accountable, that recognize pluralism, promote participation, and respect the rule of law.
We need to reach out to the poorest in society, and we have done so successfully with micro-finance programs from Grameen to Brak, to other such examples, reaching especially for women. The World Bank is proud to be associated with Canada in the launching of the consultative group to assist the poorest.
Through micro-finance programs, this woman is enabled to have a little - $35. She can earn income, she can teach her children, and she can even build a house for $300. Look at what happens. Look at the quality of the house inside. It is not just the cleanliness inside; look at the smile on her face as a result of that. This is what development is all about. Look how it's spreading - these new houses everywhere. Look at how much pride she has in holding her notebook for the micro-finance program.
It's human dignity we're talking about. It's not just economic growth; it's human dignity. And with that I think we have the chance to dare to dream that we can abolish extreme poverty by working directly with the very poor. We dare to dream, and we want, therefore, to change the development paradigm into a participatory one which is gender-balanced and people-centred and sustainable.
We have to change the paradigm to recognize that human and social capital is where the real wealth of nations comes from, not through investment. We have to change the paradigm because not too long ago this was the paradigm the world had and this is the paradigm we now have of our world. Between the two, there was a lot of progress, but it took several centuries.
Today we do not have centuries - we must change the paradigm of development in months, if not years, at most. We have to do so because of the refugees, the poor, and the marginalized. We have to do so for those who are in misery and hunger. We have to do so for those who are suffering the consequences of unsustainable economic environmental policies. We have to do so also for the women who are suffering the inequities of the current status quo and we have to do so for the children for whom we are custodians of this planet. I would dare say we have to do it for Mother Earth herself.
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Thank you very much for your attention, Mr. Chairman and colleagues.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. That was an excellent and extremely informative presentation, but I'm afraid you went too quickly for the members. Would it be possible to get some of the hard information you had in your slides, particularly the numbers?
Mr. Serageldin: Yes. There are two parts. The one on measurement is in the green one and the one on what the bank is doing is in the small booklet ``Mainstreaming the Environment''. You have all the information about all the projects and environmental lending.
The Chairman: We only have about 20 minutes, and I already have Mr. Paré, Mr. Alcock and Mr. English on our list.
Mr. Paré.
[Translation]
Mr. Paré (Louis-Hébert): After the quick presentation we have heard, it is not easy to gather one's thoughts again and ask intelligent questions.
I am reminded somewhat of the history of Saint-Remy. After his conversion, he is reported as saying: ``Now I have to burn what I adored, and adore what I burned''. The 180 degree turn made by the World Bank reminds me somewhat of Saint-Remy.
I would really like to be able to believe in the new direction which international financial institutions will take, but I am a little sceptical.
I am sceptical because last June, after the G-7 summit, the seven most industrialized nations met to talk about reforming international financial institutions, but left out the rest of the world, and particularly developing countries.
We could also ask what percentage of international aid will really be going to sustainable development. I think it is still a tiny percentage. Although your presentation is very exciting, the fact is that the industrialized countries still want to manage development-related aid.
This is a comment more than a question. I am a little puzzled about this.
Mr. Serageldin: I am very honoured to be compared to Saint-Remy. A saint, that's something!
I was just going to say that it isn't really a 180 degree shift. If you look at the curve which I showed you on increased funding directly for the environment, you will see that the curve went up very quickly, but not overnight. It covered a period of five to six years. We explain this in the booklet, Mainstreaming the Environment. We have shown that we are assuming further responsibilities and that we are thinking about this in greater depth. We are using the experience of other people. We want to learn from others while at the same time trying to pursue the direction and policy that I indicated to you.
Have we reached a new reality? The answer is no, but we are changing, which is something that cannot be said of many other institutions. At the Copenhagen Summit, on social development, we were very surprised to learn that the World Bank was one of the few institutions to make about 20% of its investments in social areas, such as education, health and nutrition.
I would like to assure you that we are on the right track and, with the methodological analysis I indicated to you, we are laying the groundwork for a new approach in the future. This analysis is not being implemented a the moment, but we will see the results of it in five to ten years.
We must do this work together, and I hope that you will join with us and help to keep us on the right path.
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As regards votes within financial institutions, this subject is often brought up by developing countries and also by the G-7. In Madrid there was a real fight within the International Monetary Fund, and the developing countries group blocked the establishment of the Eastern Europe Fund because the G-7 wanted to freeze the interests on their equity participation in the International Monetary Fund.
This is certainly a question which should be debated, but it is up to you to do so. I am just an official. As regards other policy questions, I am ready to answer any you may have.
The Chairman: So, the ball goes back to the other court.
Mr. Alcock.
[English]
Mr. Alcock (Winnipeg South): Thank you for an interesting presentation. In this forum, the public service can offer advice. I want to ask you for some advice on two things.
This is a somewhat different tone or shape to the presentation from what we had when we were down visiting the World Bank. The emphasis there seemed to be very heavily on economic development, financial systems and the like, and less, I think some of us felt, on social responsibilities.
So I'm encouraged by what you're saying, but I'm a little bit surprised, because there's a dissonance here. It's out of sync with what some of us heard and commented on or were concerned about when we met with the bank last spring. I don't know whether you feel you can comment on that, but I would be interested in your perspective on it.
Second, what do we need to be doing now to further the work you're doing in the context of decisions that must be made within the next month, not in a few years?
Mr. Serageldin: I believe what you had from my colleagues is a different degree of emphasis. I would certainly be among those who would say to you that we cannot reduce poverty without economic growth. Not a single country in the world has successfully reduced poverty in periods of stagnation. Economic growth is essential to help reduce poverty.
Second, we need sound financial management, without which we don't have economic growth and without which in fact inflation occurs, which robs the poorest, because in many Latin American countries, for example, the rich can dollarize their assets.
[Translation]
They can convert all their assets into dollars. They are not subject to inflation, whereas poor people are.
[English]
It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. If my colleagues emphasized the necessary, I would like to emphasize that it's not a sufficient condition. In that sense I see my work very much as complementary to theirs.
I have taken for granted in my presentation to this group that sound economic management and proper macro policies are a given. If they're not there, we have to attend to them. That's clear. But I would also like to emphasize that it is not enough. It will not lead to the empowerment of women. It will not lead to reaching out to the excluded. That we have to do in addition. It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
On the kinds of things needed by a group such as this committee and by parliaments everywhere, it is a very difficult question, but since you've asked me and encouraged me to give advice, I will do so.
I believe there is too much tendency to let the urgent and the immediate displace the essential and the long term. For example, in development assistance we are witnessing a huge increase in humanitarian aid, which is badly needed, but not at the expense of the investments required to prevent these things in the future. An example is agricultural research in places such as Africa to develop adaptive varieties that are drought resistant.
We must protect the environment. Population growth is coming unstoppably, and 95% of it is going to be in the developing countries. Fully 70% of the water and 70% of the land is used in agriculture. If you do not intensify and modernize agriculture - I don't mean mechanize, but intensify it - the forests will be chopped down, the hillsides will be colonized, soil will be eroded. You cannot defend the environmental agenda, the poverty reduction agenda, the food security agenda, without addressing the long-term needs of such things as agricultural research, environmental protection and investments in education while you're doing humanitarian aid.
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So I plead for wise and visionary leadership that will look a generation ahead and try to plant the seeds today that will prevent the ills of today's societies being foisted on the next generation as well.
The Chairman: Mr. Caccia.
Mr. Caccia (Davenport): Mr. Serageldin, in your presentation you gave us a very powerful illustration of poverty as an obstacle in achieving sustainable development. Perhaps you might want also to give us an indication of your thoughts on removing other obstacles. For instance, the rapid depletion of natural resources is a measure that presents a serious problem to sustainable development.
Maybe you have some thoughts on moving operations upstream, therefore removing pollution as an obstacle to sustainable development. Maybe you have also something on the large investments, in Asia as well as in North America, in fossil fuels, thus creating a greater dependence and enhancing the production of greenhouse gases.
Maybe child labour is another aspect or sub-aspect you might want to tell us more about, whether it is only a local and regional or a broader phenomenon standing in the way of sustainable development...indication of the next generation.
Finally, do you have some update for us on the Global Environmental Facility, the famous GEF, and how that is being reoriented to bring about this integration of environment and economic goals?
Mr. Serageldin: Mr. Chairman, this is quite the compelling list of questions.
Let me take the last one first. I think that fundamentally GEF is provided to deal with those parts of the problem where the benefits are global and the costs are local. In that sense it is not so much geared towards the promotion of economic growth, which is the function of institutions such as CIDA and the bank and the governments themselves.
The point you make about fossil fuels is very true. The principle of what we need to do is to measure them correctly, tax them appropriately, and thereby create incentives for alternative renewable energy technologies to be developed.
If I may say so - perhaps it is a perverse statement I will make - the best thing that could have happened for the world would have been for OPEC to continue another ten years. If OPEC had not broken apart in 1985.... We were witnessing solar energy prices per kilowatt hour coming down. They've now sort of stabilized, and all of a sudden consumption of fossil fuels is going up again. If we'd had another ten years like we did from 1975 to 1985, we might have had renewable energies. I think this is an area where government action will be required because it is a public good, a long-term good, and it may not be immediately a private sector affair.
Second, I think we need to create the kinds of incentive structures that enable investments in the kinds of technologies to take place, and to apply the polluter-pays and user-pays principle. Easily said, not easily done. In every country it's politically extremely difficult to do. I don't know enough about Canada, but I know that in the United States we have the most sympathetic environmental administration ever with Vice-President Al Gore. To get a measly 4.5¢ per gallon tax on gasoline it was one vote in the House, and Al Gore had to cast the deciding vote in the Senate to get that first budget through. By our analysis it should be a lot more than 5¢ per gallon. So these are the issues.
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Child labour is a very big problem in the developing countries. In many parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America this is one of the big issues we all must address. If we say we should not provide any kind of framework for children to be taken into labour, we must by the same token figure out ways to provide them with a minimum of basic food, shelter, health and education. This is a very big challenge and I think it's a topic for a lengthy discussion, if you wish.
The Chairman: Thank you.
[Translation]
Mr. Leblanc.
Mr. Leblanc (Longueuil): Thank you for appearing.
It seems to me that when we look at international development, the international economic standards used are often far too high for developing countries, where the people first need to be able to feed themselves and obtain the basic necessities to survive.
Would it not be possible to create a regional economy based on food self-sufficiency and essential needs, instead of trying to achieve a level of development which often does not meet the needs of the regions concerned?
I am asking this question because in many parts of Africa or even Latin America, but particularly in Africa, the economic standards being set are beyond the reach of the people concerned. Perhaps they could be shown how to make pick axes rather than being sent combine harvesters. This is of course just an example!
If standards were based on a far more regional economy, I think there would be fewer people dying of hunger or suffering from malnutrition. I do not know if your project takes this aspect into account.
Mr. Serageldin: Mr. Leblanc, there are two parts to my answer to this fundamental question. First, I think we should talk about food safety rather than food self-sufficiency, since the latter cannot be achieved in some areas because of the geographic location.
Second, I am always disappointed to see that the international media talk only about failures and never about successes.
I myself believe that a major success in Africa was the fact that there was no famine in 1992, despite forecast. Southern Africa had its most serious drought this century, yet not one single person died as a result of it because government, international agencies and NGOs reacted effectively. They managed to achieve a balance between food safety and the distribution of food. Unfortunately, the media never talk about this kind of thing. However, it is a very good example of how food safety can be organized.
On the other hand, in the well-known 1983-1984 famine in Ethiopia, thousands of people starved to death in some regions of the country because they couldn't get hold of food which nevertheless was there. Therefore, access to food is an important issue in the internal organization of a country, and to achieve this, distribution policies and the participation of farmers are essential.
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In conclusion, it is clear that there is no point in establishing enclaves if these countries are to participate in the world economy. Enormous countries such as China and the Soviet Union have not managed to do so. Today, India, with all its energy and its 930 million inhabitants, is beginning to feel the need to join the world economy, but it is facing a major obstacle. This will apply even more to smaller countries who do not have a large domestic market as do China and India. Therefore, you and we have to help them to find a way of becoming part of the world economy while ensuring that the transition is not too brutal.
This is one of the functions of international aid: to facilitate such transitions, so that they will not fall completely on the backs of the population, who are usually the poorest, most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Therefore, we must ensure that food security is achieved, and also that hope for a better future is offered to the countries concerned.
[English]
Mr. English (Kitchener): It's the second time I've heard your presentation, and like many things in human life it's better the second time. It was excellent and I much appreciated it.
I wanted to follow up on your comment about association and the Putnam pieces on Italy. I'm troubled by the direction in which that leads. The conclusion seems to be that if society has a denser civil society - for lack of a better term - it is the more successful society in terms of economic growth. It can get its act together more easily.
In terms of the United States, he's been showing some concern because, of course, bowling in leagues has dropped. He has been writing about this now.
Mr. Serageldin: Bowling Alone, yes.
Mr. English: Bowling Alone is his latest work, and he concludes that since people no longer bowl in leagues, the United States is in some state of decline.
If you take this on the international level, however, and the kind of questions we're talking about here, what is the conclusion you come to? You come to a conclusion that societies where more people work within groups are more ``successful''.
We can look at the world today in areas where people are coming to terms within groups. In the West Bank, the Hamas villages are clean, the public health is better, and the water is better. You could go on to see Hindu fundamentalism in India. You could go on to the United States and look at communities where religious movements are strong and seem to be dealing with the disintegrated forces within the United States, such as the African American communities and the turn to fundamentalist movements there. Where does that lead us?
I recall a review - I think it was in one of the American papers - about Putnam's thesis. It pointed out that there are some groups, and there are other groups. Before the Oklahoma bombing, our friends who did the bombing went bowling. I guess what troubles me about this is that a society that has groups could perhaps achieve economic growth, but the purpose of that growth and what underlies it are important.
Nazi Germany had all kinds of groups, and Germans are intensive joiners, compulsive joiners. This seems to me to be quite a break with some traditional views of development assistance and what we should focus upon. It has implications that might be rather troubling internationally. What do you do with societies that disintegrate? Do you ignore them? I don't know.
Mr. Serageldin: I think this is an extremely important point. Bob Putnam himself would be the first to tell you he concedes that the nature of the groups can be both positive and negative. After all, we know a lot of Serbian identity has led to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, so that's not really the issue.
Putnam's thesis raised an important question. Where you have a high density of voluntary associations, you tend to have more accountable governments. People who go to PTAs and form associations of this kind also vote. They also go to public hearings and voice their opinions, etc. It's not the civil society versus the government; it's the fact that the presence of the civil society leads to better government.
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What we're witnessing in the more traumatic aspects you put your finger on are two types of problems. For the United States there is a big question of scale, and whether what we're talking about are scale manifestations. In fact, there is an increase in certain scales of participation and a decrease in national versus local, for example. Different types of associative structures seem to be emerging that didn't exist before. That is a question that probably may be relevant for the United States where choice is so prevalent.
For other societies, the kind we're talking about, there are two parts to your question. What do we do about a disintegrating society and how do we deal with that aspect of it?
With a disintegrating society, hopefully one can try to intervene earlier, rather than later, to avoid having to pick up the pieces. But what do we do generally? The suggestion I have made is that we should try to recognize, wherever possible, when we see people willing to work on a voluntary basis through solidarity networks for economic objectives, and support such associations as tools of collaboration.
These tools of collaboration are not necessarily tools of political expression versus exclusionary tendencies. By their nature, depending on the society, they will tend to be quite small, village-oriented or neighbourhood-oriented. To the extent we're dealing with poverty reduction issues, whether it's micro loans à la Grameen or village associations for herders of water, these can be beneficial and benign associations. We must, of course, recognize that in the broader question of what happens to society as a whole, many of your criticisms and concerns are very real, but that's for the political process to handle.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Mr. Serageldin, unfortunately our time has elapsed. We have another meeting, scheduled to begin at 4:15 p.m., I would like to thank you very much for appearing today and agreeing to stay longer than originally scheduled. From now on, you will be able to introduce yourself at Saint-Remy. Mr. Paré will inform the international community that you have acquired such fame! I am sorry that we cannot spend more time with you. Perhaps we will have the opportunity to do so again.
Mr. Serageldin: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Like you, I also hope that there will be another opportunity. I would like to thank you very much for doing me the honour of allowing me to appear before your committee.
The Chairman: Thank you.
The meeting has adjourned.