Revisiting the powerful & universal instigator

Writing for a purpose, indeed! Well this one is a boring essay of mine which made it to the 37th ISC Symposium at St. Gallen. Hopefully, I will make it now considering (and my gtalk buddies can vouch for this) my "busy" schedule.



Resources, what resources? They ask

From time immemorial, resources have been the overwhelming cause of war and conflict, of greed and deception and of prosperity and harmony. Resources, what resources? They ask. Historically, these naturally occurring commodities, in their unmodified form, have had the potential of dictating the true wealth of a Nation. There was perhaps, never a time when a nation was content with its possession of natural resources and often, this became reason enough to annex others’. Even as the manner of subjugation transformed itself from a purely geographic one to the more dangerous yet esoteric economic one, the power factor of the Natural resources proved to be the sole reason for every political, economic and social decision made worldwide. As we shall examine and conclude in this manuscript, the role of natural resources has been that of a powerful and universal instigator.

The first question begs the nature of these seemingly nondescript natural resources, and the most potent tool we can employ is that of classification. A preliminary view may suggest categorizing natural resources as animate vs. inanimate or as renewable vs. non renewable or alternately, a distinction could be made between tangible vs. intangible resources. For instance, it is a given that the inanimate, non-renewable and tangible resource of Petroleum is the single most important natural resource known to Mankind in the 21st century. Yet, the future of a sustainable world depends on the ability of Man to harness efficiently the inanimate, renewable and intangible resource of Sunlight for meeting his ever expanding energy requirements. As we look towards future development, it is imperative that our focus on what resources to harness needs to change significantly from the one we have at present.

Even as we have expected the developed economies to show decreasing dependence on the natural resources for generation of wealth, we need to investigate and answer if this has truly been the case. We revisit the brave new world and look at territories from different parts of the world, their economies and socio-political developments to assess their strategy in this game of exploring, exploiting and salvaging the natural endowments of our planet. We also examine the crucial significance of natural resources in the historical development of any Nation. While the first part of the essay tracks down this role in shaping our worldwide development, the second part develops on specific case studies where the natural resources have proved to be the backbone of any developing economy.


The Long Age of Innocence

Of the 4.567 billion years that Earth has aged since its birth, it has been scientifically established that the genus Homo Sapiens has existed on the planet for about 250,000 years. With the exception of the past two centuries of the post Industrial revolution era, it has been a rather long age of innocence for Mankind. Early 18th century was characterized by a world population of under a billion, and modest resource consumption per individual. While it took us over 150 years to double our numbers the first time, we repeated the same feat twice successively in little less than 65 years and 40 years respectively to reach an unmanageable population of 6.45 billion individuals in year 2005. In stark contrast to the pre-Industrial revolution era man, an average individual of our century is excessively consuming, possessing needs and demands that are no longer innocuous.

During this age of innocence, Modern Man had been completely dependent on the economics of nature for survival. The rich flora and fauna teeming on the planet had kept the hunter-gatherers active until about 10,000 years ago when the advent of agriculture brought man in a state of mild negotiation with his environment, leading to the rise of human settlements. These settlements were predominantly rural civilizations which were self sustaining in their occupations of agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing and forestry.

Even though the earliest instances of trade dates back to 150,000 years, the majority of long distance trading routes came into prominence much after 3000 BC. Be it the Harappans in Indus Valley trading metals with Mesopotamians or years later the closely linked Silk Route connecting China to Mediterranean Europe through India, Persia and the Middle East, the socio-economic development of these isolated settlements was catalyzed solely by exchange of their natural resources. The earliest items of trade were restricted to the naturally occurring commodities that these settlements were endowed with aplenty, such as metals and their ores, precious stones, spices, silk etc. while artifacts (symbolical or practical), created by human skill, came into prominence much later.

The innocence of that era had much to do with our approach in harnessing the resources of the land. Even though it lacked the scientific nature of a sustainable method, it was not all pervasive and exhaustive. Times of transition were seen gradually with the replacement of manual labor with automation triggering the Industrial Revolution.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

A remarkable shift in the dynamics of production was triggered by technological innovation with the adoption of the machine, initiated by the invention of the steam engine. This process transcended across existing industries from textile to iron-making, from increased use of exhaustible resources such as Coal and Petroleum to improvement in the modes of transportation. The socio-economic face of the planet changed much too quickly after that and it was only a matter of time before the innate imperialistic nature of Man would make the dynamics political with annexation and subjugation of the lesser developed world.

As Adam Smith indoctrinates in his work, “The Wealth of Nations”, the maxims of division of labor and efficiency in production took precedence. Consumption was thrust on the general populace with ever increasing production and myriad products flooded markets. To prevent any imbalances that could occur between supply and demand, it became essential for the new found economies to trade these products in isolated markets abroad. This in turn, made quite a few of the labor intensive occupations redundant and was instrumental in economic subjugation of existing rural economies.

The New World Order

The emergence of a new world order within the post Industrial Revolution era was a given. While there was a remarkable shift of population from rural areas to the new formed cities and from farms to factories in the newly Developed World, there was an imperative economic domination that took the garb of Imperialism as the divide between the now Developed and the Under Developed World widened. With this the control of resources of the subjugated economies changed hands. As the world was segregated into a set of ruling Nations and a set of colonized territories, the dominating aspect of the occupation was the possibility of exploit natural as well as human resources.

While colonization involving annexation of territories and thrust of political control reached its apex during the two World Wars, it receded with the setting up of international organizations to promote economic development and cooperation among nations such as the United Nations Organization or the UNO almost 3 centuries after its birth. However, more recently a new form of Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism has emerged with the Developed economies evolving more esoteric ways to burden the Less Developed Countries of debt, to be able to assert control over their assets and resources. While the nature of tools employed for rendering this control has shifted from powerful weapons to financial / trade policies, neither the spirit of controlling nor the victims themselves have changed.

Examples of Neo-colonialism are galore, especially evident in the weak African nations such as erstwhile Belgian colony of Congo, where a hastened decolonization process was followed by foreign investment to control major natural resources based industries such as mining and forestry.

A Great Leveler?

It is easy to recount not one but many instances where the presence of natural resources have single handedly had the potential / altered the economy of countries uniquely. In most cases, economies have faltered due to their inability in harnessing these resources to their best capacity.

A typical case in point is that of Peru. For centuries, Guano, excrement of birds, bats and seals, had been harvested along the Peruvian coastline profitably. The `unique dry weather, colonies of sea birds and absence of human intervention ensured deposits of Guano that had been collected to a depth of meters. Guano is one of those rare and valuable products that were valued and traded like Gold, and which had found multiple uses, most prominently as a powerful natural phosphates fertilizer . Not only, was the discovery of this product the cause of the War of the Pacific (Peru-Bolivia alliance Vs. Chile) but lead to the Guano Islands Act, a federal legislation passed by the U.S. Congress to colonize these Pacific islands to harness these resources.

In no other instance is an event more dramatic on account of its socio-economic implications as the one that occurred in California in mid 19th Century. The California Gold Rush accounted for the migration of over 300,000 Europeans and Americans within a few years to the odd hamlets in California in quest for the valuable reserve of Gold. This represented a 20 times increase in population of the Europeans in the state within a decade, while the Native American population during the same period was shot down to one fifth of its original figure of 150,000. Since then, California has become the symbol of the Great American Dream, while preserving its land of plenty by replicating the Gold Rush numerous times for not only the miners in 1850, but for farmers, oil drillers, movie makers, airplane builders and "dot-com" entrepreneurs during the past 150 years.

Today, located as we are in all possible parts of the planet, if we feel the one natural resource common to us all, our weather, we realize that we are very close to a global failure. When the temperature recorded in California is 25C less than that in New York, we know that the world’s biggest economy, which just witnessed a record annual increase of 3.5% in its Gross Domestic Product, is STILL very much going through a crisis. When we look at the records of recent disasters and deduce that their frequency has been increasing dramatically, be it a tsunami, an earthquake, or a hurricane, we know that the writing is on the wall. In our horde for natural resources, we have amassed and come to control many but without realizing their nature of them all. Our choices and decisions for consumption have been untimely, unplanned and exhaustive leading us to this brink of a resource endangerment.



Bibliography

1) “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, by Adam Smith (1776)

2) Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) – Multiple articles from the free online encyclopedia, transcending topics such as Age of Earth, Trade Routes, Industrial revolution, Imperialism, History of the World etc.

3) “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2017”, Congress of the United States, Congressional Budget Office.

4) “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, by John Perkins (2004)

5) “The Accumulation of Capital”, by Rosa Luxemburg (1913)

6) Information about individual economies from Amiglobe 2002 – Copyright by Olivier Collard

7) "Japan Economy", CIA World Factbook available online at the CIA webaddress: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ja.html

8) “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”, by Kwame Nkrumah (former Prime Minister and President of Ghana), originally published 1965