By IANS
United Nations : India has suggested better international economic governance – making globalisation fair, making the Doha Round truly developmental and comprehensively reforming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – to avoid conflicts over natural resources.
"Creative solutions are needed to the crisis of expectations and the disparities in economic development," India's permanent representative to the United Nations Nirupam Sen said Monday while participating in a Security Council debate.
These cannot be divorced from international economic governance, he said, suggesting that while many developing countries are crucially dependent on natural resources, often these natural resources cause and prolong conflict, he said.
This "leads to lower growth and higher poverty sometimes in natural resource poor countries; as in a Greek tragedy, the saviour is also the damned," Sen said describing it as the nature of the "natural resource curse".
Conflict holds back development but a certain kind of development also leads to conflict, he said, as "globalisation sharpens inequality and regional imbalances, often stimulating natural resource-rich regions of a country to try to break away."
Similarly, IMF-encouraged deflationary policies and elimination of subsidies as well as WTO-encouraged trade liberalisation has substantially reduced rural purchasing power and tipped the scales of the "natural resource curse" into conflict, he said.
While conflict prevention through better management of the exploitation of resources is theoretically an idea worth considering, it is in practical terms, fraught with legal and operational complexities, Sen said.
"We are therefore of the view that the best method of preventing conflict, prior to its outbreak, lie in more comprehensively addressing the problems of inequality and economic deprivation," he said.
A judicious mixture of sanctions to prevent illegal exploitation of natural resources and certification schemes, such as the Kimberley Process, has begun to yield some results, Sen said noting that this approach appears to have been successful in the case of rough diamonds.
As a result, major diamond trading and processing nations such as India have engaged constructively and actively with the Kimberley Process, he said.
Authorising a role for the UN Mission and the UN peacekeeping forces in conflict-torn countries, Sen said were among some useful suggestions in the UN concept paper.
However such a mandate would need to be very carefully drawn up, both to creating a post-conflict consensus on the use of natural resources in the process of peace consolidation, he said.
"Effective and consensual exploitation of natural resources not only brings tangible benefits to all segments of society, but also provides the intangible benefit of creating a useful and desirable habit of cooperation among former foes in a post-conflict society," Sen said.