UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Dr. Areti Krishna Kumari?

Introduction:

Sustainable Development is often an over-used word, but involves a number of inter-related global
issues such as poverty, inequality, hunger and environmental degradation etc., People tend to
think that we have to make a choice between environmental protection and development.
Development that is sustainable and not damaging to the natural resources is very much possible.
To achieve sustainable development the three pillars--economic, social and environmental--must
be integrated in a balanced way. Conserving land and water resources, protecting biodiversity and
managing agricultural heritage systems are very important for sustainable development. There is
no inherent contradiction between environment and development, and that these two concerns
should be mutually supportive. Protection of the environment should not be seen as a sectorial
interest but as an integrated component in all economic and social development. A sound
management of natural resources, energy saving and a population size in harmony with the
productive potential of the ecosystems will automatically result in sustainable development.

The idea of sustainable development grew from numerous environmental movements in earlier
decades and ultimately defined as: Development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.1 This contributed to the
understanding that sustainable development encompasses a number of areas and highlights
sustainability as the idea of environmental, economic and social progress and equity, all within the
limits of the world’s natural resources.

Summits such as the Earth Summit in Rio and in Brazil, 1992, were major international meetings to
bring sustainable development to the mainstream. There have been many achievements over the
past thirty years. World trade has increased fifteen fold. Global per capita incomes have doubled.
Life expectancy in developing countries increased. In spite of these facts, the record on moving
towards sustainability so far appears to have been quite poor. The concept of sustainability means

?
Dr. A. Krishna Kumari, Ph.D (Law): Consulting Editor: ICFAI University, Hyderabad, A.P. India
1 The World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission 1987)

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many different things to different people, and a large part of humanity around the world still live
without access to basic necessities. For example 1.3 billion still do not have access to clean water,
half of the humanity is lacking access to adequate sanitation and approximately two billion people
are living without access to electricity. And this is in an age of immense wealth in increasingly
fewer hands. The inequality of consumption (and therefore, use of resources, which affects the
environment) is terribly skewed: “20% of the world’s people in the highest-income countries
account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures — the poorest 20% a minuscule
1.3%”2One billion people suffer from hunger and some 2 to 3.5 billion people have a deficiency of
vitamins and minerals. Poverty is an important reason for the overuse or misuse of nature. Thus
the struggle against poverty is in fact an indirect method of environmental protection.

Establishment of UNEP:

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in Nairobi to act as a
catalytic instrument to promote the sustainable development. The Declaration and the Action Plan,
with recommendations for international action adopted at Stockholm, were particularly instrumental
in the subsequent rapid development of international environmental law. Principle 21 of the
Declaration has special significance; it contains the provision that States have the responsibility to
ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment
beyond their own borders.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment:

In March 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was released. This 2,500-page report
was four years in the making, drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years, and
funded by the Global Environment Facility, the United Nations Foundation, the World Bank and
various others.

Surveying the planet, it made a number of conclusions that many have stressed for years. The key
messages from the report included the following points:

2 1998 United Nations Human Development Report

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?Everyone in the world depend on nature. The ecosystems provide the conditions for a decent,
healthy, and secure life. But man made several changes in the ecosystem to meet the demands
for food, water and energy. The changes in fact helped to improve the lives of billions. But, at the
same time the nature’s ability to deliver other key services such as purification of air and water,
protection from disasters, and the provision of medicines has been weakened.
?Human activities have taken the planet to the edge of a massive wave of species extinctions,
further threatening our own well-being. The loss of services derived from ecosystems is a
significant barrier to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty,
hunger, and disease.
?Unless man changes his attitude the damage caused to the ecosystem will worsen in the future.
In dealing with the Sustainable development it is very important to involve the local communities.
They must be given ownership to the natural resources so as to reap the benefits.
?Even today’s technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on
ecosystems. They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to
be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.
?Better protection of natural assets will require coordinated efforts across all sections of
governments, businesses, and international institutions. The productivity of ecosystems depends
on policy choices on investment, trade, subsidy, taxation, and regulation, among others.3

Poverty and Sustainable Development:

We tend to think poverty is lack of cash. But it is not true. Poverty is lack of access to natural
resources. Millions of people in the world live within subsistence economy. For these millions,
environmental degradation is not a matter of luxury; it is a matter of survival. Development is not
possible without environmental management. In fact, what is needed is to regenerate the
environment for development. Sustainable development is therefore, not about technology but
about a political framework, which developed power and gave people — the victims of
environmental degradation — rights over natural resources. The involvement of local communities
in environmental management was a prerequisite for sustainable development.

3Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being, An interpretation of the key messages to emerge from the
assessment, from the Board of Directors governing the MA process, March 2005

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Health is both a resource for, as well as an outcome of, sustainable development. The goals of
sustainable development cannot be achieved when there is high prevalence of debilitating illness
and poverty, and the health of a population cannot be maintained without a responsive health
system and a healthy environment.4

We have to really trust people and communities. As yet, all we have done is use bureaucratic tricks
to stall and obfuscate. We will have to make changes — effective and earnest — to devolve
powers in the practice of managing the environment.5

Technology and Sustainable Development:

Global system for sustainable development (GSSD) is a dynamic, knowledge based meta-
networking system. It supports decisions and policy and represents stakeholder expression and
interest. For a strategic approach to greater synergism among current initiatives nationally and
internationally, it enhances communication and interaction between institutions towards
sustainability. 6

Whether it is developed nation or developing nation for sustainable economic knowledge-especially

technological knowledge is necessary. Between the rich and the poor – though we do not
recognize, knowledge is the basic gap. Bridging this gap is an urgent global priority.

Economic Development and Sustainable Development:

Economics is meant to be about efficient allocation of resources to meet everyone’s needs.

However, international power politics and ideologies have continued to influence policies in such a
way that decision-making remains concentrated in the hands of a few narrow interests. The result
is that the world’s resources are allocated to meet a few people’s wants, not everyone’s needs.

4 WHO: At 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development

5
Sunita Narain, Devolution has to happen. It will, Down To Earth Magazine, Janury 31, 2003

6 http:// gssd.mit.edu

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An increasing consensus developed in the 1980s that environmental degradation undermines the
basis of economic development unless radical steps are taken. At the same time, developing
countries took the view that if poverty and underdevelopment are given priority, a sound and
sustainable environment would follow.

Excessive third world debt burden has meant that it has been harder to prioritize on sustainable
development. Unfair debt, imposed on the third world for decades by the global institutions, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank through their harsh Structural Adjustment
programmes (SAPs) have opened up of economies rapidly, in socially, politically, environmentally
and economically destructive ways, while requiring a prioritization on debt repayment and cut
backs on health, education and other critical services. They have encouraged concentration on
producing just a few cash crops and other commodities primarily for export, using very
environmentally damaging “industrial agriculture”, which reduces biodiversity, requiring costly
inputs such as environmentally damaging pesticides and fertilizers to make up for the loss of free
services a diverse farm ecosystem would provide.

Diverse sources of food was destroyed and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger
quantities of specific commodities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water and
toxic chemicals in the process. Since cattle and earthworms are our partners in food production,
stealing food from them makes it impossible to maintain food production over time.

More grain from two or three commodities arrived on national and international markets, but less
food was eaten by farm families in the Third World.

The gain in “yields” of industrially produced crops is based on a theft of food from other species
and the rural poor in the Third World. That is why, as more grain is produced and traded globally,
more people go hungry in the Third World. Global markets have more commodities for trading
because food has been robbed from nature and the poor.7

7 Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 12-13

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For years, rich countries have been migrating some polluting industries to poor countries, but still
producing primarily for rich countries. This has been possible insofar as it is cheaper than to pay for
costly environmentally clean technologies that people demand.

The extension of social and political rights, the promotion of rural locations of industries, and trade
policies favouring female small-scale producers and traders should be put high on the agenda of
economic policies.

Agriculture and Sustainable Development:

It is perhaps natural to assume that we are growing food to feed people, but are struggling to keep
up. Reasons are frequently attributed to the effects that rapid population growth places of poor
countries as the ultimate cause. However, we make more than enough food to keep up with
population growth, although environmentally damaging industrial agriculture threatens future
sustainability. In spite of this, there is so much hunger in the world. While rich live to eat, it is the
poor who eat to live.

Fod is available to those who can afford it, not necessarily those who need it. Most food is
therefore produced to meet consumer demands, not the needs of the poor and hungry. Farmers
cultivate but do not enjoy good food.

This leads to a major diversion, and even wastage, of environmental resources from productive
uses to non-productive uses. For poor countries that need to earn foreign exchange to pay off huge
debts, cash crops offer the chance of money. For elite landowners, this is the only way they can
make money, as the poor have little. As professor of anthropology, Richard Robbins, summarizes:

?To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers
grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other
people to buy. The present trend is food is a commodity like other commodities. Had agricultural
lands been used for agriculture today there would not have been this amount of hunger and
poverty in the world. But we are using these lands for growing commodities like as cotton, sisal,
tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally
nutritious, but for which there is a large market.

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?Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland are used to pasture cattle, an extremely
inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.
?More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is
fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed.
?The food equation does not count the poor people. There is nobody to grow food for the poor.
?One cannot expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to
provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, one cannot expect
ADM (“Supermarket to the World”A large food processing company) to produce food for them.
?What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least,
ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a
market demand for food.8

In addition to minor nutritional quality, or damaging consumer’s health, some major agricultural
products also involve production practices that damage the health and safety of workers and the
environment.

For example, rainforests are often cleared to make way for grazing animals to be slaughtered for
unhealthy fast food meat consumption, while prime land and the surrounding environment is often
degraded when producing cash crops for the wealthier parts of the world. The effects are
numerous. Vandana Shiva also captures this issue:

Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups
in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact.
Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land
degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of
red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top
soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten
times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.

8
Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development: http://www.globalissues.org/

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Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world’s total grain production. In the United
States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock.9

This hints the advantage vegetarianism or reduced meat consumption may have from an
ecological perspective. Meat products such as beef in the past have been luxuries, turned into
created needs because it has been profitable to do so in the last few centuries.

Industries such as the fast food industry benefit from people consuming more fast food meats and
sugar-based products. Excessive consumption of coffee, alcohol, tobacco, etc, place an extra
burden on the poor and on environmental resources, both in production of these products as well
as at the other end, where health departments are already strained.

Yet this all contributes to economic measures such as Gross National Product. Economists and
politicians look at these to see how well their policies are faring. Selling more sugary products or
fast foods to children and adults results in more sales! Many environmental costs are either not
accounted for or only partly so. For example, if the full cost of water by the meat industry in the
United States was accounted for, common hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound!

We end up in a situation where 1 billion suffer from hunger, while another billion suffer from obesity
the result of overeating.

Water Management: Sustainable Development:

Like air, water- the life source, is a natural resource- which should be available to all the human
kind without any reservations. Few decades back in India, the concept of buying water was not
known. Today, the whole scenario is changed. Today, 1.3 billion people in the world have no
access to clean water. A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water,
and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World. 10 400 million children have no access to safe

9
Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 70-71.

10 (Maude Barlow, Water as Commodity— The Wrong Prescription, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, Backgrounder,

Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3)

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water. 1.4 million Children die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate
sanitation 11 Multinational companies across the globe own or operate water systems that bring in
about $200 billion a year. Yet they serve only about 7 percent of the world’s population, leaving a
potentially vast market untapped.”12

The main reason for the water crisis is the commoditization of water. Promoting water as a
commodity, led to increased control of water by multinational corporations. The World Bank, IMF
and others have encouraged countries around the world to privatize water access in the hope for
increased efficiency as well as follow other policies such as removal of subsidies for such
provisions. In doing so, the poor have found themselves being shut out as prices have risen
beyond affordability.13

All over the world poor families depend on public taps because of the exorbitant water connection
charges and the water meter charges thereof. This is the height of privatization.

In India Coke had been pumping water from local wells and aquifers, this led to farmers digging
deeper and deeper to search for waters, under sometimes dangerous conditions. Some farmers
were digging as deep as 450 feet without finding water. They wanted Coke to leave for they
brought them nothing but misery. Indeed, earlier in 2000, violent protests by farmers in the state of
Kerala led to the closure of Coke there, because for each liter of drink from Coca Cola, some 3
liters of water was needed.

Privatization of water services, leads to serious impacts- such as lack of access. Few decades
back Indians could quench their thirst from a roadside hand pump. Now, they have to buy a bottle
of water- which proudly displays- it is packaged drinking water spending between Rs.10-12. The
poor cannot afford the connection charges and the cess rate which follows. Most of the public

11 State of the World’s Children, 2005, UNICEF

12 (John Tagliabue, As Multinationals Run the Taps, Anger Rises Over Water for Profit, New York Times, August 26, 2002)

13World Without Water, from True Vision Productions broadcast by Britain’s mainstream media channel, Channel 4 on April 29,
2006.

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water taps, which one finds in the slums brings with them epidemic, contagious diseases because
of the leaked pipelines. Numerous health and social problems develop, especially for the children
and the poor when they resort to illegal connections. We can often see such actions by poor as
being “illegal”, but the system itself encourages such last-resort actions.

Governments have done an abysmal job of protecting water within their boundaries. However, the
answer is not to hand this precious resource over to transnational corporations who have escaped
nation-state laws and live by no international law other than business-friendly trade agreements.
The answer is to demand that governments begin to take their role seriously and establish full
water protection regimes based on watershed management and conservation.14

Article 25 of UN Declaration envisages that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate
for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, and housing and
medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of ...
circumstances beyond his control.”15 Practically all the nations signed this document. Now, the
million dollars question whether water is a fundamental human right, or a commodity; a privileged
service that you can only access if you can afford it.

While water is not mentioned explicitly, the right to food includes water as well, because water is
essential for humans to live, and is therefore in line with the principles of the declaration.

Priority of drinking water:

It takes a great deal of water to manufacture our goods. We need news papers to know what is
happening around the world. In spite of it we should know that a new paper needs 150 gallons of
water for its manufacture, to prepare one liter of orange juice (industrial) 1000 gallons of water is
needed. To get one pound beef we need 2500 gallons of water. The roads are crowded with motor

14Maude Barlow, Water as a Commodity— The Wrong Prescription, Institute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder,
Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3

15 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, December 10, 1948

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vehicles. In the manufacturing of one new car 40,000 gallons of water is required. These figures
show how and why water has become a commodity.

While transnational corporations over-exploit water resources as they expand industrial and
agricultural capacity, they pollute the water table through pollution or overuse.

Water use is being diverted from agriculture to industry. To feed the voracious global consumer
market, China has transformed its entire economy, massively diverting water use from
communities and local farming to its burgeoning industrial sector. As the big industrial wells
consume more water, millions of Chinese farmers have found their local wells pumped dry. Eighty
percent of China's major rivers are now so degraded, they no longer support fish. Economic
globalization and the policies that drive it are proving to be totally unsustainable.16

International Agreements:

Access to fresh water is becoming a political problem, rather than a technical one. Water as a
human right. Water is a management problem, a cultural problem, rather than a resource problem
in most cases. Governments should participate in people’s projects rather than people participating
in governments’projects. Female involvement will be important. Women are often more sensitive
to cultural and other issues which will be important. Water should maintain a common property
resource, common heritage of all. However, there may be costs associated with being able to
provide the infrastructure and services in a sustainable way.

However, as per the final declaration of the water forum, water security was defined to mean that
“freshwater, coastal and related ecosystems are protected and improved; that sustainable
development and political stability are promoted, that every person has access to enough safe
water at an affordable cost to lead a healthy and productive life and that the vulnerable are
protected from the risks of water-related hazards.”

16
Maude Barlow, Water as a Commodity— The Wrong Prescription, Institute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder,
Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3

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What is lacking in policy making:

Whether it is food or water- we do not lack them. It is the lack of management and the priorities.
There is plenty of food and water but not to the poor. The Governments should address these
issues. Policy making with humanitarian intentions coupled with technical knowledge will solve the
problems of hunger and poverty. The making of decisions and the formation of policy seldom draw
on the full range of knowledge. What further needed are multiples forms of networking policies
across stake holder communities- to help identify innovative approaches, enabling technologies
and new institutional, financial and regulatory mechanism for meeting sustainable challenge. The
goal should be to bring together business and industry, international institutions, national
governments and research and scientific institutions – so that comprehensive and integrated
strategies can be formulated. Strategic collaboration is a necessity, it is not a luxury. Interaction
should be encouraged between science and technology; between business and industry; and
between national governments and International organizations of the developing countries – so
that they have a right to nutritious food and drinking water as a matter of right.

Another major change is the realization at the international policy-making level that in the era of
globalization sustainable development can only be achieved through close partnership between
Governments, the private business sector and civil society. People’s participation in planning their
own future, poverty alleviation, equality of opportunities, and equitable growth are necessary for
environmental sustainability.

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