Why Is The World The Way It Is?

Presented below is the acceptance speech by Dr. Ashok Khosla on receiving the prestigious UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize 2002 for his contributions in the field of environment through the creation of sustainable livelihoods for empowering the people subsisting below the poverty line.

As a person who spends much of his life with peasants and third world villagers, I hope you will forgive me for being somewhat overwhelmed to find myself among such a distinguished gathering.  It is only the serendipitous setting of this evening’s event that gives me the courage to share a few thoughts with you – because the thoughts uppermost in my mind concern the lives of those very kinds of folk whose art surrounds us this evening at this wonderful and elegant location.

I am grateful to the United Nations Environment Programme and the Nippon Foundation and of course to the Sasakawa Award Jury for having honored me with this year’s prize.  And, equally, I feel quite humbled.  Humbled, when I think of what little I myself have been able to do and of how much credit I get for the work and effort of so many others.

     Parents, family, teachers, friends, some of them present here contributed far, far more to the outcomes you have generously described this evening than I can enumerate within the time allotted to me here.

      And, of course there are my fellow workers, all those colleagues who did the actual work.  Over the years, I have had the fortune to work with some of the world’s best.  For most of my professional life, my job was quite simple: all I had to do was to listen.  And that is perhaps why I am here, because I did try to listen: to the people who taught me, to the people I worked with and most of all to the people I set out, some thirty years back, to try and serve: the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten – a description that we sometimes forget fits more than half the people living on our planet.  The kind of folk whose art this beautiful museum celebrates.

What I heard was quite discomforting

•    Why, they asked, are so many of us hungry, thirsty, unhoused, unclothed and illiterate when we work as hard as anyone else and there is enough knowledge, technology and wealth in the world to make a decent life possible for all?

•    Why are the waters we drink, the air we breathe and the forests, soils and rivers which feed and nurture us being hijacked for the greed of the powerful few, while we have to keep moving to ever more marginal lands to meet our most basic needs?

•    Why do our lives keep getting worse while world leaders proclaim so loudly that they are doing everything for our benefit?  

      In some ways, peasants are not very different from the child who could not see the Emperor’s new clothes.  They tend to ask rather obvious, down to earth questions.  “If more than one trillion dollars has been poured into the developing countries over fifty years of so-called international development assistance, why is my life no better than it is?”

      We all know the figures.  A fifth of the people on this planet live on less than one dollar a day.  Almost half of them live on less than two.  Can any of us imagine living on two dollars a day?  Even in a low income, low cost country like mine, it would seem impossible.  Yet, that is what nearly three billion people around the world manage to do.  It’s not living, really; it’s more like an animal existence – a daily battle against hunger and basic needs, a losing war for the last vestiges of human dignity, self-respect, hope.  And they have neither the financial nor the political power to do anything to help themselves. If you can’t feed yourself, how can you hope to govern yourself?

      Is our society so immunized that it needs a St Francis or a Mahatma Gandhi to arouse our sense of outrage at the inequity and injustice that exists in our world? Or could we somehow find it by ourselves in our own consciences?  Is it acceptable to our individual or collective sense of humanity, in today’s world of knowledge and plenty, that there should be a single woman, man or child who is hungry, thirsty or illiterate?  Let alone three billion, the greatest mass of poverty known in history?  I believe that it is no more unacceptable than the absence of democracy, human rights and freedom over which so many people do occasionally manage to get worked up.  And, meeting here in this extraordinary tribute to people’s creativity and surrounded outside by the greatest concentration of wealth and power ever seen in history, one has to ask is this simply a massive disjoint?  Or is there some connection?  Could it be that massive wealth cannot exist without massive poverty?

      Whatever the headlines are preoccupied with today, I believe the Central Question right now is: How do we eradicate poverty and rebuild the health of our environment?  And, this question is relevant to the lives of all, whether in the North or the South.  Lifeboat Earth as a whole cannot stay afloat for long if the leak at one end keeps on growing.  The answers provided by political leaders, practitioners and professional researchers have been highly complicated and arcane – partly because this is a good way to stay in business, and partly perhaps because they know no better.  The interventions they prescribe, however, are usually simplistic, narrow, mono-dimensional and short-term.  But the opposite is what we need:  the real answers are, in fact, quite simple, though they might need fairly complex and strategic interventions to achieve them.

      Having worked for some twenty years in academic research, business, Government, and in the UN, I decided to try the civil society.  I soon found that none of these conventional sectors could, in their present form, answer the Central Question.  They are too busy solving their own problems, creating their own conceptual and operational frameworks, their own continued existence gradually becoming the raison of their etre.  Very few, if any, were able to make more than a superficial impact on the lives of the poor or on the quality of the local resource base.  And those that could, such as the wonderful and highly dedicated community based initiatives one finds scattered throughout the world, were not scalable.

      What we need is new kinds of institutions.  Even the global community is beginning to recognize this, witness the latest terminological fashions in international dialogue: partnerships, alliances, corporate social responsibility and Type II relationships.  But, to tell you the truth, even these emerging concepts do not go far enough.  To achieve truly sustainable development, the new institutions we need have to merge and meld, within their own domains the strengths of each one of the sectors: the social objectives of the civil society, the motivation of the private sector, the innovativeness of the academia, the reach of the government – and, above all, the participation of the people.  In short, we must bring into being a new institutional species, which could perhaps be called the “Independent Sector”.  The term “Social Enterprise” is another possibility.

      Some 20 years back, my colleagues and I set out to design just such an organization, which has now come be known as the Development Alternatives Group, one of the first independent sector organizations and the first dedicated to sustainable development. 

      Our mission was to find an answer to the Central Question.  And, over the years, I believe we have made some progress towards finding it: if we genuinely wish to eradicate poverty and to bring back our forests, rivers and soils, we must create sustainable livelihoods – large numbers of sustainable livelihoods. 

      What are sustainable livelihoods?  Simply put, they are jobs that produce goods and services for the basic needs of people and at the same time generate a decent income with which to purchase these.  They give meaning and dignity to life and in parallel regenerate the resource base which has been devastated over the past half century of mal-development.  In the Third World, we will have to create some one billion sustainable livelihoods over the next fifteen years.  The concept may well be relevant in the First World too, but that – like the urgent need for more sustainable consumption patterns and sustainable production systems in the North — is a subject for another occasion.

      Today’s development patterns are not creating such livelihoods.  In fact, they are de-creating them.  The imperatives of the current market systems are forcing more and more people out of the factories and farms of poor nations and replacing them with machines. We are creating more and more products but adding less and less purchasing power.  That, by the way, is in good part the root of today economic stagnation.  If the number of customers with money levels off, to who can one sell all the output of the vast productive capacity we have built up around the world?

      I am not for a moment suggesting that the market is always bad.  It is not.  On the contrary, I believe local enterprise, is the key to answering the Central Question.  It has brought the awesome wonders of modern technology to all parts of the world.  Many of us live longer, healthier and more interesting lives in part because of globalization.  But its benefits have mostly been appropriated by only those who can afford to pay for them – the middle class and above.  Half the people of the world have been left out of its ambit – and many have actually been impoverished by it.  The UNDP Administrator earlier this week wrote that “people in some 60 countries got poorer over the past decade.”  Such an outcome is not in anyone’s interest – for the wealthy or the poor.  There is considerable evidence now that the world economy will not be sustainable unless the basic needs of every inhabitant are met and the resource base is made healthy again.  

      So, it is not just a moral imperative to eradicate poverty, but an economic one and above all an ecological one as well.

      Sustainable development – in which the environment, social equity and empowerment are equal partners with economic improvement – cannot be achieved by economic policies that only nurture big, centralized, transportation-intensive, energy-guzzling, resource-wasting production systems.  The trickle-down hasn’t worked and the environment cannot take it.  In some instances, economies of scale do imply large-scale production but for most of the things people need, local, decentralized, environment-friendly production is far more sustainable.  And this leads us to the basic question: how do we go about creating sustainable livelihoods? 

      They cannot be created by narrowly conceived, short-term interventions and certainly not by the kinds of highly subsidized, give away approaches common in many so called “poverty alleviation” programmes.  Sustainable development needs holistic, systemic interventions that help societies and communities build the capacity to define their own problems and design appropriate solutions.  This means building the technical, managerial and financial skills of people, setting up robust decision support systems, and creating institutions of local governance capable of managing resources for the benefit of the community.  They also need strong public infrastructure – not just the big power stations, highway systems, airports and dams that are favourite activities of the development profession, but also local, renewable based energy production in remote areas, rural roads and universal connectivity.  And they need a vibrant, alert and capable civil society.

      Over the years, Development Alternatives has taken a no alibi, no excuse responsibility to strike out on new paths that lead to the creation of sustainable livelihoods.  To create new types of technologies and institutions, we have built up an effective capacity to innovate on the ground.  To multiply and scale up, we have chosen the viral replication approach of the business enterprise and the marketplace.  To ensure that the technologies and markets stay true to the purpose of sustainability, we have chosen the local, the decentralized and the renewable over the big, the concentrated and the non-renewable.  Our ability to build the capacity of local groups led DFID of the UK Government recently to appoint us custodians and managers of $70 million to distribute to small organizations in the poorest areas of India over the next four years, making us the largest single donor agency for sustainable development in the country.  We have to give all the money to others, so unfortunately it’s not available for our own programmes!

      Sustainable livelihoods are not created by governments or by big corporations or even by NGOs.  They need sustainable enterprises.  And sustainable enterprises need sustainable technologies, sustainable financing systems and sustainable management methods.  This chain of reasoning quickly leads us to what the world must, sooner rather than later, do: innovate, finance and manage its resources in a completely different way so that everyone can benefit from the enormous progress a part of our world has tasted, both in the scientific and the political spheres.  Sustainable livelihoods, by their nature, have to be created largely at the local level, with local resources and for local production. But even the most remote, local village economy does not exist in a vacuum.  Whether sustainable livelihoods get created depends in large measure on policies and economic instruments determined at the national and international levels.  In the current situation, these policies act not to nurture but to destroy them.

      This brings me back to the emperor’s new clothes.  How, I have to ask, can a world that espouses certain basic civilisational values such as the primacy of law, the centrality of logic and the non-negotiability of the principles of fairness countenance so many activities that are so unlawful, illogical and unfair? 

      Where is the fairness in any of the current international environmental negotiations – climate change, biodiversity conservation – where virtually every nation is continuing to act in narrow self-interest to perpetuate existing disparities regardless of whether they will threaten the survival of the planet or harm the interests of the poor?

      Where is the logic in the Millennial Goals set by a Summit of national leaders without establishing the ways and means to achieve them?  Talking about these goals, do you think they realized that by setting goals in terms of halving the proportion of the population, instead of halving the actual numbers of people, that are poor or hungry or without drinking water, they simply endorsed, more or less, the status quo?  If the stated goal for people living in extreme poverty is met, the number of such people will come down from 1.3 billion in the year 2000 to 1 billion in the year 2015.  Such is the inexorable mathematics of exponential population growth.   In fifteen years, there will still be twice as many people living in extreme poverty as the entire population of Europe and North America put together.  And, according to the UN Secretary General, even this rather un-ambitious goal is unlikely to be reached.  In fact, his recent figures show that just in the two years since the Millennium Summit, Sub-Saharan Africa has actually added 16 million more people to the numbers living below the $1 a day poverty line.  In my own country, despite (or is it because of?) more than a decade of liberalization and 6 or 7 % annual growth rate, the number of unemployed has actually risen significantly.

      The other day, I was at a big international meeting where the chairperson opened the plenary with a simple question to all the delegates: “What in your honest opinion is the practical solution to the food problem of the rest of the world?” he asked.  Within half an hour, the conference had degenerated into total consternation and chaos.  The East Europeans wanted to know what “opinion” meant.  The Asians said they didn’t understand the word “honest”.  The Latin Americans had difficulty with the word “practical” and the Middle Eastern delegations could not understand the concept of “solution”.  The Africans asked what is “food” and the Europeans had no translation for the word “problem”.  And the Americans – well, they were completely mystified by the term the “rest of the world”.  

      We all recognize that global dialogue is needed more today than at any time in history.  But we need a genuine dialogue.  Not a dialogue of the deaf that characterizes so much of the environment and development debate that continues today. 

      If we are to create the sustainable livelihoods that alone can form the basis of a more sustainable development, each one of us will have to evolve a better understanding of our long-term interests and to work together, nationally and globally to make them possible.