by Paul K. Driessen
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services
July 2003

WASHINGTON, DC, July 2003 — three intertwined doctrines are all the rage among corporate, environmental, government and religious activists these days ¡V and unfortunately all are condemning the world’s poor to lives of abject squalor.

The first, called corporate social responsibility, argues that companies should conduct their affairs with more concern for activists’ pet causes than making a profit for shareholders.

The second, known as sustainable development, says companies must restrict themselves only to activities that “meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

The third, dubbed the precautionary principle, requires companies to halt any activities that may threaten “human health or the environment” even when there is no documented cause-and-effect relationship.

All of that may sound noble at first blush, but the truth is that radical activists from affluent Western countries created these buzz phrases to promote their own socialist agendas. They ¡V and they alone ¡V define what is “responsible” in a way that blocks any development that doesn’t meet their exacting environmental demands, even though it may mean locking the world’s poor into a hopeless life of chronic hunger and poverty.

For people in the Third World, the three doctrines are dangerous, and even deadly. They impose the loftiest of developed world standards on developing nations, while ignoring the needs and aspirations of people who struggle daily just to survive.

For instance, few of the more that 2 billion Africans and Indians living today have access to electricity. Half a billion women and children in Africa, Asia and Latin America currently spend their days collecting firewood, or squatting in mud laced with animal feces and urine to collect, dry and store manure for use as fuel. Few attend school. Millions die every year from preventable lung diseases and dysentery caused by indoor air pollution and filthy drinking water.

Ironically, the poor in the teeming slums of New Delhi have the same aspirations for themselves and their families as Sierra Club members in gated communities in the Hamptons, La Jolla and Sausalito. Above all, they want to live in modern homes, determine their own destinies, and enjoy electricity, safe water and other basics that Westerners take for granted.

“We don’t want to be encased like a museum,” one Indian woman plaintively told a television news crew.

They also want to protect their environment. “If people don’t have electricity,” points out Gordon Mwesigye, a senior official in Uganda, “they will cut down trees, and Africa will lose its wildlife habitats and the health and economic benefits that abundant, reliable, affordable electricity brings.”

Dams in Uganda and Gujarat Province, India, could provide electricity and safe drinking water. But First World radicals oppose their construction and are pressuring international aid agencies to withdraw funding. These countries shouldn’t make the same “mistakes” we did by building mammoth hydroelectric projects, the activists insist. They should opt for wind turbines, or solar panels on huts. They mustn’t dam up good kayaking rivers or use fossil fuels.

An additional 14 million Africans face imminent starvation. Modern science could reduce their anguish ¡V through seeds and crops that have been genetically modified, to make them resistant to drought, salt and insect pests, reduce the need for pesticides, and save wildlife habitat by enabling farmers to grow more food on less land.

The U.S. has shipped African countries thousands of tons of genetically modified corn ¡V the same corn that Americans have been eating safely for years. But environmental radicals and the European Union are screaming “genetic pollution” and threatening to withdraw aid and ban agricultural exports from any countries that plant or distribute the grains.

One can only wonder if the activists’ cars will soon be festooned with such bumper sticker slogans as: “Solar for huts — and huts forever” or “Sustainable insects, expendable people” or perhaps, “Better dead than fed.”

For the sake of the world’s poor, it’s time to ask the eco-activists, bureaucrats and Hollywood elites exactly how their anti-energy, anti-biotech and anti-people policies are moral, compassionate, sustainable or socially responsible.