Samonte, Chrisha Anne B.

EMC 1Y1-1

STAS 111

Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries

As the UN’s new sustainable development goals are launched in New York, there’s little to approach.
Heads of states are gathering in New York to sign The UN’s new sustainable development goals or SDGs.
The main objective is to eradicate poverty by 2030. Famous artists are invited on board. It’s set to be a
monumental international collaboration. Given all the fanfare, one might think the SDGs are about to
offer a fresh plan for how to save world, but beneath all the hype, it’s business as usual, the main
strategy for eradicating poverty is the same: growth. Orthodox economists insists that all we need yet is
more growth. There more progressive types tell us we need to shift some of the yields of growth from
the richer segments of the population to the poorer ones. But this approach is not enough, because
even at the current levels of average global consumption, we’re going beyond our planet’s bio-capacity
by more than 50% each year. This means growth isn’t an option for us anymore because we’ve grown to
much , to the point that we are blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. This means we
need the rich Countries to catch down to poorer countries, not the poor countries are to catch up with
the rich ones because if we are to catch up with the rich ones we are slowly destroying our planet, we
may be rich when it comes to financially, but when time comes the climate change would take revenge
to us because we’ve abused the nature too much. This global crisis that we are facing is due almost
entirely to overconsumptions in rich countries. It’s either we slow down voluntarily or climate change
will do it for us. What we have today would be useless or nothing when time comes as mother earth will
exclaim payback. But even if we look at measures of overall happiness and wellbeing in addition to life
expectancy, a number of low- and middle-income countries rank highly. Costa Rica manages to sustain
one of the highest happiness indicators and life expectancies in the world with a per capita income one-
fourth that of the US. Increasing amount of stuffs doesn’t make anyone happier, its about quality over
quantity.