Needs testing

"The one who is the richest is not the one who has the most but the one who needs the least." -- Lao Tse

NGO's sooner or later have to grapple with the question of who is 'poor' and how rich does a person 'deserve' to be. As we will probably see in our lifetime the consequences for the environment of China's 1bn inhabitants achieving Western-consumerist lifestyles are not pretty. Although we don't distribute it fairly we already have enough food to amply feed everyone on the planet, but when it comes to feeding petrol guzzling SUV's for the 5bn non-Westerners out there it's another story.

Already oil is knocking on US$70/barrel, at least double what it was last year, and although everything from Iraq to Katrina has been used to explain the high petrol prices in the layman's press. But in the financial and business papers they talk darkly of the Chinese thirst for oil that is only just beginning. It's nothing like the American need or that of other Western nations but it's heading towards that level and unlike tinpot dictatorships in the Middle-East the US can't just march in and bomb anything that moves for no good reason. They're scared of China... at least they're scared enough to be a bit more careful than that. But the threat is clear, we may soon have to compete for that oil that we've been splashing all over the place up until now.

But even if there was enough oil the fact remains that if everyone in China lived like us the world would collapse from the strain. So we have to come to terms with the fact that 'justice' is not just about ensuring the third world has access to the basics, like essential medicine, clean water, housing and food. It's also about persuading the yuppy nations to live within the planet's means - to 'need' less. Of course it's also a personal thing, a group of people that want to make the world a just place have to adjust to reasonable 'needs' themselves too.

In short, despite what 25 years of economic rationalist propaganda has told us, economics is a zero-sum game, not because there's a limited supply of time or money but because the old assumption that environmental resources are infinite might just be about to fail in the most spectacular way.