IT is referred to as brazils valley of death and it may be the most polluted place on Earth. It lies about an hours drive south of So Paulo where the land suddenly drops 2000 feet to a coastal plain. More than 100000 people live in the valley along with a variety of industrial plants that discharge thousands of tons of pollutants into the air every day. A reporter for National Geographic recalls that within an hour of his arrival in the valley his chest began aching as the polluted air inflamed his bronchial tubes and restricted his breathing.101
The air in the valley is loaded with toxinsamong them benzene a known carcinogen. One in ten of the areas factory workers has a low white-blood-cell count a possible precursor to leukemia. Infant mortality is 10 percent higher here than in the region as a whole. Of the 40000 urban residents in the valley municipality of Cubato nearly 13000 suffer from respiratory disease.
Few of the local inhabitants complain however. For them the fumes smell of jobs. They also distrust bids to buy their property by local industry which wants to expand as well as government efforts to relocate them to free homesites on a landfill. One young mother says Yes the children are often ill and sometimes can barely breathe. We want to live in another place but we cannot afford to.
A university professor of public health Dr. OswaldoCampos views the dirty air in Cubato simply as the result of economic priorities. Some say it is the price of progress Campos comments but is it? Look who pays the pricethe poor.
102 Maybe the poor do pay the price of pollution but there are those who believe that they should have more of it. One of them is Lawrence Summers former director of the NationalEconomic Council and a past president of Harvard University. He has argued that the bank should encourage the migration of dirty polluting industries to the poorer less-developed countries.103 Why? First Summers reasons the costs of healthimpairing pollution depend on the earnings forgone from increased injury and death. So polluting should be done in the countries with the lowest coststhat is with the lowest wages. The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country he writes is impeccable.
Second because pollution costs rise disproportionately as pollution increases it makes sense to shift pollution from already dirty places such as Los Angeles to clean ones like the relatively underpopulated countries in Africa whose air Summers describes as vastly under-polluted. Third people value a clean environment more as their incomes rise. If other things are equal costs fall if pollution moves from affluent places to less affluent places.
Critics charge that Summers views the world through the distorting prism of market economics and that his ideas are a recipe for ruin. Not only do the critics want greener development in the third world but also they are outraged by Summerss assumption that the value of a lifeor of increases or decreases in life expectancycan be measured in terms of per capita income. This premise implies that an Americans life is worth that of a hundred Kenyans and that society should value an extra year of life for a middle-level manager more than it values an extra year for a blue-collar production-line worker.
Some economists however believe that Summerssideas are basically on the right track. They emphasize that environmental policy always involves trade-offs and that therefore we should seek a balance between costs and
benefits. As a matter of fact the greatest cause of misery in the third world is poverty. If environmental controls slow growth then fewer people will be lifted out of poverty by economic development. For this reason they argue the richer countries should not impose their standards of environmental protection on poorer nations.
But even if economic growth is the cure for poverty other economists now believe that sound environmental policy is necessary for durable growth or at least that growth and environmental protection may not be incompatible. First environmental damage can undermine economic productivity and the health effects of pollution on a countrys workforce reduce output. Second poverty itself is an important cause of environmental damage because people living at subsistence levels are unable to invest in environmental protection. Finally if economic growth and development are defined broadly enough then enhanced environmental quality is part and parcel of the improvement in welfare that development must bring. For example 1 billion people in developing countries lack access to clean water while 1.7 billion suffer from inadequate sanitation. Economic development for them means improving their environment.
Still rich and poor countries tend to have different environmental agendas: Environmentalists in affluent nations worry about protecting endangered species preserving biological diversity saving the ozone layer and preventing climate change whereas their counterparts in poorer countries are more concerned with dirty air dirty water soil erosion and deforestation. However global warmingheretofore of concern mostly to people in the developed world threatens to reverse the progress that the worlds poorest nations are gradually making toward prosperity. Or so concludes a 2007 U.N. study.104 It offers a detailed view of how poor areas especially near the equator are extremely vulnerable to the water shortages droughts flooding rains and severe storms that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are projected to make more frequent and the authors call on rich countries to do more to curb emissions linked to global warming and to help poorer nations leapfrog to energy sources that pollute less than coal and oil.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What attitudes and values on the part of business and others lead to the creation of areas like the valley of death?
2. Should the third world have more pollution as Lawrence Summers argues? Assess his argument that dirty industries should move to poorer and less-polluted areas.
3. Some say Pollution is the price of progress. Is this assertion correct? What is meant by progress? Who in fact pays the price? Explain the moral and the economic issues raised by the assertion. What are the connections between economic progress and development on the one hand and pollution controls and environmental protection on theother?
4. Do human beings have a moral right to a livable environment? To a nonpolluted environment? It might be argued that if people in the valley of death dont complain and dont wish to move then they accept the risks of living there and the polluters are not violating their rights. Assess this argument.
5. Assess the contention that people in the third world should learn from the errors of the West and seek development without pollution. Should there be uniform global environmental standards or should pollution-control standards be lower for less-developed countries? 6. Even though they will probably be hit hardest by it poor nations are less able than are rich countries to deal with the consequences of global warming. As a result do rich nations owe to it to poorer nations to curb their own emissions more than they otherwise would be inclined to do? Do they have an obligation to provide poorer nations with or help them develop greener industries and sources of energy? Explain why or why not.