Date published: 2006/03/01
The fourth lecture of the university's Fourth Annual Lecture Series in Sustainable Development (2006) was given today by Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of Anglo American and former chairman of Shell, with the apposite title "Does resource extraction contribute to development?". He was from the old school, so just gave a talk from paper, rather than from Powerpoint. And given his job it's pretty obvious he made sympathetic noises about corporations, in particular, oil, gas and mining companies.
He said that he had lived in nine countries and visited another thirty during his career, and mentioned a few he thought had developed reasonably successfully (Oman and Malaysia) and one he thought had obviously not (Nigeria). So he claimed there was no "resource curse". The main issue was one of governance, and how "civil society" managed to work with government. And although multi-national corporations are hate figures for NGOs and the "left", he claimed that small local firms were much more likely to cause environmental problems or abuse human rights than the multi-nationals. Well, perhaps, but of course everyone has their favourite example of poor behaviour by a multi-national (and several people at the end brought theirs up).
He said that he was in favour of transparency, and in particular of something called the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). With oil, for example (and presumably with other resources), he said that it should be public knowledge how much oil companies pay the respective government in royalties (so reported by both sides and hopefully the two numbers more or less agree).
At the end he was asked by a couple of people what companies should do for countries when the resources run out, so the royalties stop. More warm words, about how the money should have been spent on education, etc., so that the country can move on. And one person specifically asked whether some of the money should be spent on subsidising renewable energy projects. Well get serious, what business is it of the corporation to tell the government what to do with its money. Anyway, that brought the subject inevitably onto climate change. And here, he said that he did not think the market would solve the problem by itself, but that it needed a regulatory framework in order to guide the market.
Someone asked why didn't the government just turn the clock back, and force people to use less energy (e.g. via the tax system). Cambridge academics, eh. Well of course government could do this, only, as Moody-Stuart pointed out, democratic governments have a habit of not wanting to upset voters. But voters are not nearly so powerful as portrayed. For example, Ken Livingstone managed to screw the working class with the introduction of the so-called London congestion charge and get away with it, partly because the powerful media and commercial interests portrayed it as a good thing (removing the peasants from the streets of London, hence freeing it up for companies and the rich), and partly because many of the people affected live outside London, hence do not have a vote on the matter. And in the quasi-democracy of Singapore they of course have made car ownership so expensive that only the truly rich can afford one. Unfortunately this kind of demand management is always talked up by the people (e.g. academics and so-called environmentalists) who do not suffer the consequences (because they are rich).
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