It is immoral for us to slow growth

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said last Sunday that his country’s annual growth target has been lowered to seven percent for the next five years. He made this remark in an on-line chat with the nation. “We must no longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid growth as that is unsustainable,” he said. He urged the government to shift its focus from GDP growth to the quality and benefits of growth.

Premier Wen’s statement comes in the wake of huge concerns in the West over the impact of China’s (and India’s) economic growth on the global environment. China's GDP growth reached 10.3 percent last year and is expected to be nine percent this year. Although he was talking to his netizens, Wen’s message was aimed at his critics in the West. His remarks appear to be eminently sensible--who could be against protecting nature? But is Premier Wen right to slow down the growth rate of a poor nation? I do not think so.

There is a saying that a woman can either be beautiful or faithful but not both. The proverb illustrates the human tendency to create mental boxes and fit people into them. Wen appears to have fallen into the ecological trap in believing that you can either have high growth or a clean environment. We too will soon be asked that if China is taking steps to lower its growth rate, why is India still obsessed with high growth? Indeed, the day after Wen’s online chat, India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee presented a road map in the Budget to achieve a 9% GDP growth rate, hoping that it might go higher.

The dichotomy between high growth and protecting the environment is false. A nation can grow rapidly and save its environment just as a woman can be both beautiful and faithful. The only sensible way to grow, in fact, is to make peace with nature and save the green-blue film on which life itself depends. But to ask a poor country to slow down its economic growth is immoral—it is to condemn its poor to penury. The past two hundred years teach us that the poor will only rise into the middle class unless there is growth. Growth creates jobs and wealth, which the government taxes and spends on roads, education and healthcare, and this enables the poor to rise. Indeed, 350 million Chinese and 225 million Indians have risen out of poverty in the past 25 years because of high growth.

Once upon a time I used to be a huge fan of the ecology movement, but I feel gloomy today. I am upset that so many fine projects have suffered from endless delay at the hands of activists. No one calculates the real cost of delay--the lost future of a starving child who does not realise a dream when a factory or power plant does not come up. The movement has evolved into an anti-science, anti-growth, secular religion. I shudder to think that if activists had been as zealous in the 1960s, they would have killed India’s ‘green revolution’, which multiplied our wheat and rice crop many times and succeeded in feeding 500 million additional mouths.

Meanwhile, bureaucrats and politicians have captured ecology and made it a lucrative business in India. Indeed, the prime minister complained in 2009, “Environmental clearances have become a new form of Licence Raj and corruption.” Hence, I was glad when a clean, modern minister came in 2009. But my optimism soured quickly when he turned activist and began to re-open major projects, such as Niyamgiri, Lavasa and POSCO, and proceeded to “make an example” of them. His arbitrariness resounded around the world and turned investors against India. The Reserve Bank reported recently that India’s foreign direct investment declined by 36% in the first half of 2010-11 primarily because of “environment policies in mining, integrated township projects and ports.” Of course, the environment ministry must ensure that projects meet standards, but it must do so by creating transparent institutions and not through arbitrary acts.

All of us must become sensitive to nature, especially with the rapid degradation of forest cover and global warming. But we must also be aware of the fundamentalist and irrational nature of the ecology movement, which is willing to sacrifice human opportunities to preserving nature. Environmentalists have nostalgia for vanishing, old lifestyles and refuse to admit that their earlier Malthusian predictions were wrong. Despite massive population growth, people around the world are better off today, and as prosperity and education spreads, population growth has begun to slow down in most countries. Obviously, we have to protect nature, but if it does come to a choice, human beings, I think, must precede nature. To believe the contrary is not only elitist but also immoral.