----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> ***** World Politics 51.2 (1999) 297-322
>
> The Political Economy of the Resource Curse
>
> Michael L. Ross *
>
> ......At first glance, the role of resource wealth in economic
> development looks like a question of dwindling importance. In 1970,
> 80.4 percent of the developing world's export earnings came from
> primary commodities; by 1993 it had dropped to 34.2 percent. But most
> of this drop was caused by the fast growth of manufactured exports in
> East Asia and a handful of Latin American states. Three-quarters of
> the states in sub-Saharan Africa and two-thirds of those in Latin
> America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East still
> depend on primary commodities for at least half of their export
> income. 1...
>
> 1. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (unctad),
> Commodity Yearbook 1995 (New York: United Nations, 1995).
>
> <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v051/51.2er_karl.html>
*****
>
> It seems there are a number of nations -- actually a large majority
> in the world -- whose economy may be easily described as "basically
> extractive." A number of such nations have already collapsed --
> quite spectacularly sometimes, as in the case of the "Democratic
> Republic of Congo" (formerly Zaire).
=========================
Ah, yes, the Dutch Disease:
http://are.berkeley.edu/courses/envres_seminar/stijns_f02.pdf
http://www.russianeconomy.org/comments/070201.pdf
http://www-irps.ucsd.edu/irps/faculty/altamirano.pdf [challenges the hypothesis]
http://icg.harvard.edu/~ec3410/Papers/matsen.pdf [DD and optimality]
A robust green-red-blue-rainbow "based" political ecology would need to be part of current and future peace/anti-war movement[s] as the Right has it's own eco-pessimism scenario, which could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; the environment-security paradigm. I asked Santa for the following:
VIOLENT ENVIRONMENTS
Nancy Lee Peluso (Editor); Michael Watts (Editor)
Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief, a staple of governmental decision-making during both Clinton administrations and widely held in the environmental security field, depends on particular assumptions about the nature of the state, the role of population growth, and the causes of environmental degradation.
The conventional understanding of environmental security, and its assumptions about the relation between violence and the environment, are challenged and refuted in Violent Environments. Chapters by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists include accounts of ethnic war in Indonesia, petro-violence in Nigeria and Ecuador, wildlife conservation in Tanzania, and "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites.
Violent Environments portrays violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and societies, yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations. The authors argue that specific resource environments, including tropical forests and oil reserves, and environmental processes (such as deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance) are constituted by and in part constitute the political economy of access to and control over resources. Violent Environments demands new approaches to an international set of complex problems, powerfully arguing for deeper, more ethnographically informed analyses of the circumstances and processes that cause violence.
I used the following rather extensively during organizing work in the run up to the WTO:
Third World Political Ecology -- by Raymond L. Bryant , Sinead Bailey
By drawing on examples from throughout the Third World, Bryant and Bailey explain the development and characteristics of environmental problems that plague parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America and their political and economic bases.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. An Emerging Research Field 2. A Politicised Environment 3. The State 4. Multilateral Institutions 5. Business 6. Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations 7. Grassroots Actors Conclusion