On Growth

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54. Lester R. Brown

Lester R. Brown is a senior fellow with the Overseas Development Council, a private, nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C.
He was born at Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 1934. He studied at Rutgers University and at Harvard University.
Formerly he was administrator of the International Agricultural Development Service and served as policy adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture on world food needs and agricultural development abroad.
Mr. Brown has written the following books: Man, Land and Food (1963), Seeds of Change: The Green Revolution and Development in the Seventies (1970), and his latest book, World Without Borders (1972), has drawn wide attention in the US and abroad.

What exactly is the Overseas Development Council?

The Overseas Development Council is a nonprofit research and educa-

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tional institution established in 1969 to improve the relationship between the United States and the poor countries. We are a small bureaucracy by Washington standards, numbering some twenty individuals, half professionals and half supporting staff. We are supported financially by three large foundations - Ford, Rockefeller and Clark - and about forty multinational corporations. We do not contract work and are financed entirely through grants.

Do you advise the World Bank?

We work with the World Bank in the same way that we work with any other organization whose primary business is international development. We work with the Agency for International Development, the OAS, the Inter-American Development Bank, other development agencies, the UN agencies and so forth.

Limits to Growth was a very controversial report right from the start of its introduction in the United States. Where does this controversy originate?

The Limits to Growth is a threat to many people. It's a threat to economists, for example, whose tool kits contain tools designed primarily to stimulate and encourage growth. Those tool kits will become somewhat obsolete if growth is no longer the objective. It's also a threat to people more generally because it brings into question the entire matter of life-style.

You referred in your recent book to the need to evolve a new social ethic for all mankind. What is the nature of this new ethic?

The circumstances in which we find ourselves in the late twentieth century call for the formulation and eventual adoption of a common social ethic. This new ethic must be responsive to the need to accommodate ourselves to the finite ecosystem in which we exist. Among the components of this social ethic would be such things as the basic changes in attitudes toward childbearing needed to stabilize global population, the need to abandon the concept of planned obsolescence which underlies a modern, materialistic industrial society such as the United States, the need to recognize that we share the resources of the globe in a way that we haven't before, that is we depend on common sources of petroleum

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reserves, of marine protein and of waste-absorptive capacity. As we press against the limits of these resources, we must begin thinking of how we share them. Interestingly as we begin to press against the limits of various resources we find that the interdependence among countries rises very rapidly.

Let me cite an example: The state of Florida two years ago was experiencing a severe drought. It was threatening agriculture and it was threatening wildlife in the Everglades. The state of Florida signed a contract with a rainmaking firm to make it rain over the Florida peninsula. It did eventually rain, but at the expense of the surrounding oceans. If Texas had signed that contract, it could have been at the expense of Mexico. If Pakistan had signed such a contract, it might have been at the expense of India. This is just one example of the way the interdependence among countries increases as we attempt to expand the supply of scarce resources. There are corporations, some of them quartered here in Washington, D.C., which will sign a rainmaking contract with anyone in the world who will pay them. It can be farmers' associations, state governments, national governments, or ministries of defense. There interventions cannot go unregulated. We have reached the point where we need a supranational institution to regulate the intervention of national governments and international Monetary Fund attempts to regulate actions of national governments which affect the international monetary system.

That is exactly what Sicco Mansholt of the Economic Market in Europe is advocating; supranational institutions. But then comes the next question: How to police them?

The question of enforcement is a difficult one. My own feeling is that if we are to get a shift in global priorities in an increasingly interdependent world, it requires supranational institutions that have not only purpose but muscle. For example, we must think of giving the UN much more peace-keeping authority.

To cite another example: Last year global military expenditure totaled two hundred and four billion dollars. That sum exceeds the income of the poorest one-half of mankind. I submit that in an increasingly interdependent world that's not an acceptable ordering of global priorities. The sum of national priorities does not add up to a rational set of global priorities. The time has come to begin thinking in terms of global priorities based on the needs of all mankind.

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Discussing this new organization of global relations and building bridges, do you think in order to construct a global infrastructure, the Forrester Law approach might be a useful tool?

The Limits to Growth emphasizes the limits of at least a number of important resources, ranging from arable land and fresh water to waste absorptive capacity. As one begins to recognize that there are limits to how far one can go, at least in some areas, without irreversible changes occurring, we see an interesting psychological shift in thinking at the international level. As long as the global economic pie, if you will, or the supply of any given resource on which economic growth depends, can be expanded indefinitely, the rich can say to the poor, ‘Be patient and wait, your turn will come, things are expanding.’ But once the reality of the finiteness of some resources at least, begins to dawn on people, then the issue shifts in a very dramatic way. The issue is no longer how do you expand the pie, but how do you divide it. This is a very important question.

You mentioned in your book World Without Borders that leaders of poor countries could very well claim in the near future the marine protein supplies of the oceans for their own protein-deficient diets. Then, of course, there will be a clash, and they have just as much right to claim as anyone else.¹

As long as there were more fish in the ocean than anyone could hope to catch, how the catch was distributed was no problem. But once we reach the point where we're pressing against the limits of oceanic protein yields as we are now doing for several important commercial species of fish, things begin to change. Recent years have witnessed heavy investment by the industrial societies of the north, the Soviet Union, Japan, the United States in large fishing fleets, in floating fish factories, in advanced technologies, such as sonar, for locating and catching fish wherever they can be found throughout the world. The poor countries, who very much need marine protein, cannot compete in these terms. They don't have the capital. They don't have the technology. The only way they can compete is by extending their offshore limits, which they are now doing. Some fourteen countries have extended their offshore territorial limits from the traditional twelve miles to two hundred miles in order to protect such coastal fishing areas.

In 1972 mainland China joined the ranks of the poor countries, sup-

1 See pp. 37-38.

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porting their two hundred mile offshore territorial claims. This is significant because mainland China is the first nuclear power to align itself with this effort by the poor countries to increase or protect their share of world protein resources.

Marine biologists now feel that the world catch of many species of fish is very close to the maximum sustainable limit. We are confronted with the need of establishing global limits on the annual catch of various species and then dividing that catch country by country into national quotas. The question is how to do that. The rich countries, of course, would like to freeze the pattern where it is, because that would enable them to retain the predominant share of the world's marine protein supplies. If one were to distribute the catch on a per capita basis, then the poor countries would get two-thirds and the rich countries one-third. That would not be an unreasonable position. There's also the possibility, which you mentioned, that the poor countries, which are suffering severe protein malnutrition among their people, may propose a formula whereby they will get first claim on this common global resource. After all, many of us in North America or in Europe are overfed anyhow, consuming far more protein than we need.

Or we feed it to animals.

Exactly. For our indirect consumption in the form of poultry, for example. One of the important questions that needs to be addressed is how to distribute the earth's resources and wealth. As Americans, representing six percent of mankind, we consume a third of the world's resources. It has been part of the conventional wisdom in the international development community that the two billion people living in the poor countries could not aspire to the North American life-style, because there simply was not enough petroleum, iron ore, protein and so forth.

It might be bad to have in China seven hundred million people, but seven hundred million rich Chinese would wreck China in no time.

Perhaps not only wreck China but seven hundred million Chinese with two cars in every garage would put an enormous stress on the world's petroleum reserves, needless to say. As long as Americans could depend primarily on indigenous resources, whether it be petroleum, minerals or what have you, the question of how much was consumed was largely an internal matter. But as we come to increasingly depend on others for

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resources that we consume, we must confront the question, Why should six percent of mankind be permitted to consume a third of the world's nonrenewable resources? As Americans we must begin asking ourselves that question because, increasingly, others are beginning to ask it and we must be prepared to respond. I have suggested to audiences I have talked to in recent weeks that if they wanted an interesting and challenging exercise, when they're at their desks, to sit with a pad and try to explain in five hundred words why we as Americans should be permitted to consume a third of the world's resources. It is not an easy question to deal with, but it is one that we must increasingly confront in various situations where the terms under which the United States gains access to reserves of oil and mineral in other countries are being negotiated or where formulas for allocating common resources are being considered.