Press conference by peruvian ambassador on ‘the myth of development’

Asserting that the term “developing country” was a misnomer, and that today’s poor States would be better described as “non-viable national economies”, Peruvian Ambassador Oswaldo de Rivero presented his book “The Myth of Development”, during a press conference held this afternoon at United Nations Headquarters.

The existing model for development -- “the California model” -- actually posed an enormous obstacle to sustainable development, he declared.  Consisting of huge and chaotic urban expansion that swallowed millions of tonnes of water and energy and destroyed agricultural land while paradoxically demanding millions of tons of food, it produced physical-social imbalances in which the needs of expanding urban poor populations collided with the limitations of a country’s water, energy and food supply.

The “California model”, he stressed, was financially and ecologically unsustainable.  Yet, by 2025, nearly the entire planet would be urbanized, with 30 to 40 mega-cities of more than 10 million inhabitants.  Urging all to imagine a world in which the 5 billion-plus population of developing countries used more than 4 billion credit cards for their purchases and sent 7 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere per capita, he pressed home the need to stop cloning the existing model.  Otherwise, he joked, humanity would need to buy another planet.

Moreover, World Bank statistics on human development from 1975 to 2003 showed that, in 140 so-called “developing countries”, the average per capita income had not increased, he noted.  Only eight countries had registered an increase in per capita income of 5 per cent or more in the past 28 years, and such increases could only be considered adequate to overcome poverty if they reflected a more equal distribution of wealth.  Yet, by all reports, inequality continued to increase worldwide.  A recent International Labour Organization (ILO) report indicated that half of the world’s working population was living on less than $2 per day.

Many countries must abandon their dreams of development and adopt policies of national survival based on the provision of basic water, food and energy supplies and population stabilization, he said.  The Millennium Declaration –- with its focus on halving world poverty by 2015 -- could well represent the last opportunity to control the damage wrought by unfettered urbanization along the Californian line.

The Declaration, he stressed, was not about development.  It was a survival pact.  Following upon the failure of three consecutive international development decades –- the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s –- it merely confirmed that development was not occurring.  Poverty eradication did not constitute development; development was the creation of wealth.

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