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A major obstacle to promoting policies that foster sustainability to date has been the incomplete measurement of income and investment, particularly the failure to reflect the use or deterioration of natural capital. To correct this failure, the World Bank is promoting improvements in Systems National Income Accounts (SNA). Environmentally adjusted SNA has massive policy implications for most developing countries. Without environmentally adjusted SNA for example, the Bank now postulates, that we cannot judge if an economy is genuinely growing or merely living unsustainably on asset liquidation beyond its true income; whether the balance of payments is in surplus or deficit on current account, or whether the exchange rate needs to be changed.
The sustainable economic development credo is not that appeals to all - or perhaps even most - NGOs. One of the key architects of the Brundtland Commission formulation of sustainability, Secretary General Jim MacNeill, has said that: "The maxim for sustainable economic development is not 'limits to growth'; it is the 'growth of limits". This definition, based on stretching environmental limits to accommodate expanding human needs, will certainly not appeal to those who argue for a "steady-state economy", let alone to supporters of the "deep ecology" world view. But the mainstream sustainable economic development community recognises that we are faced with some fairly inexorable population trends. Faced with this challenge, the argument runs, the imaginative use of emerging technologies can help relax "natural" limits by boosting our resource efficiency helping us do more with less. In the end, however, limits will be definite, and the steady state unavoidable.
Although the liable and legalistic part of the international business community is embarking on the Sustainability trend, at the very same time, critics of industry can point to exactly opposite movements. Critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) note that hundreds of US companies have been joining the rush to capitalise on Mexico's cheap labour and lax environmental laws by locating along the 1,250-mile border between Mexico and the United States. More than 2,000 such companies, or "maquilas", now represent Mexico's second largest source of foreign exchange after oil and are helping to create environmental legacies which will haunt Mexico for decades to come.
But the concept of sustainable economic development is rarely now seen as evidence of an imperialist or neo-colonialist conspiracy. Growing number of newly industrialised and developing countries recognise that this has to be the way forward the real issue is how fast to move and who pays. It will be well worth watching countries like India over the next decade: the Confederation of Indian Industry (Cll) is working hard to disseminate the thinking of organisations like the Business Council for Sustainable Development to Indian companies.
More fundamentally still, the sustainability implication which few - if any companies have yet considered relates to the issue of "need". Markets grow by inventing new needs, new wants. new desires. At some point, the sustainable economic development vector will intersect with this aspect of the market economy, with the result that business will increasingly find that it is no longer enough simply to consider the environmental performance of a product from cradle to grave - but, even more fundamentally, we will have to ask whether the likely impacts are balanced by the meeting of real needs.
Ultimately, sustainable development has to be sold to the citizens of every country in Africa, whether they are acting as industry's neighbours, as employees, voters, parents, or consumers. Despite public opinion polls showing surprisingly high levels of environmental awareness, concern and action in a wide range of countries, the public's support cannot be taken for granted. These are the people who will ultimately have to pay and to sacrifice other possible rewards to ensure that future generations inherit a world worth living in. We need to see more advertising and media campaigns which carry aspects of the sustainability message through to the general public in their everyday lives standing waiting for buses or trains.
The critical role of ordinary citizens is recognised in the European Commission's Fifth Environmental Action Programme - and the European Union may well be worth watching as it struggles with the task of communicating, sustainability to an increasingly diverse range of nationalities. This, in microcosm, will represent a useful model of the challenge facing the world as a whole.
Sustainable economic development principles are beginning to be adopted - or at least experimented with -by some international government agencies, by some national governments and by some corporations and business organisations. Unfortunately, however, the early involvement of the business community (and particularly of the marketing profession) has spurred the process whereby the words "sustainable. and "sustainability. - like "green" or "environment-friendly" before them - are strapped onto other words. So one sees phrases like "sustainable use. (of natural resources), "sustainable society" (or economy), "design for sustainability", "sustainable manufacturing", "sustainable mobility", "sustainable tourism", "sustainable futures" and even "sustainable growth". This process seems to simply give a green light for further consumption, further production, further growth, which is a falsification. But, from another perspective, this can be seen as an important first stage in the selling of the idea of sustainability to the citizens and to voters, who will need to understand why real sacrifices may be needed to ensure a genuinely sustainable future.
If there is one thing more long-standing proponents of sustainable economic development would agree upon it is this: to arrive at a sustainable state, our industrialised societies will have to re-invent themselves, just as agricultural societies reinvented themselves during the Industrial Revolution. As a result, Meadows et al. have spoken in terms of the "Sustainability Revolution". But sustainable economic development will only move from the realm of talk to the world of action if it is seen to offer real-world solutions to recognised problems.
Anyone searching for a visionary account of what all of this could mean in terms of everyday realities for governments, corporations and citizens, should read: "The Ecology of Commerce". In talking of the need to make the transition to a "restorative economy", Hawken, the author sketches the extraordinary scale of the challenge now facing us. Reassuringly, he also shows that the transition is still likely to be manageable and could well turn out to be one of the most exciting historical stages which our species has yet gone through. At long last we seem to be approaching the point where the list of possible solutions is beginning to catch up with the still growing list of problems.
Four and a half billion people or 85 per cent of world's total population, occupying 72 per cent of the land area of the globe, belong in the category of low and middle income countries of the South with a per capita income ranging from US$ 80.(Mozambique) to US$7,820.- (Saudi Arabia) in 1991. If these countries in their endeavour to raise income per capita are following the same path as the industrialized countries. its impact will be catastrophic to the global environment. It is therefore necessary for the South to follow a different path of development: one that makes possible the eradication of poverty and at the same time does not degrade the environment. This calls for an elaborated pattern of sustainable economic development that meets the interests of the South.
Sustainable economic development as pursued by the South must foremost focus its efforts on meeting the developmental challenges which are the causes of environmental degradation. In this connection the first objective of sustainable development must be to eradicate poverty. Poverty, as defined by the World Development Report 1990 refers to the inability to attain a minimal standard of living. This inability is caused by factors internal to the poor such as no skill, low education, no shelter, poor health and low capacity to respond to income-earning opportunities. On the other hand it is also caused by factors external to the poor such as no access to land tenure, minerals or other natural resources, no access to credits or other financial resources, no access to markets, no access to technology and no access to productive infrastructure like irrigated water, electricity, transportation, etc.
To overcome this inability, development should be geared to ensure the poor the provision of basic needs such as nutritious food, clothes, shelter, basic education, health facilities and clean water. All this requires a development policy that is focused on engaging the poor in productive employment.
Productive employment can be created by diversifying the primary sector based economy into a secondary and tertiary sector based economy. The experiences of the six economies of Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan and China have shown that average annual growth rate of agricultural income has drastically increased during 1965-1988, although the agriculture's share of output and employment has declined sharply during the same period. The various factors that contributed to the success of agriculture in these economies are land reform, agricultural extension services, genuine decentralization, popular participation, reasonably good infrastructure and heavy investments in rural areas. High productivity in agriculture strengthened the competitive position of these economies, and allowed them to raise their market share in the commodity market in spite of declining commodity prices. The share of agriculture in gross domestic output did not decline not because of reduced output, but because of the increased share of other non-agricultural output. It is important to note that it is possible to move from an unbalanced primary sector based economy towards a self-reliant growth economy with diversification and higher value added.