People such as Paul Ehrlich used to warn that as population began to outstrip resources, the result would be a dramatic increase in wars as nations vied to gobble up what few remaining stocks of oil and other resources were still available. According to a |World Watch Institute| report, however, the reality is almost exactly the opposite — an abundance of resources is driving wars in the developing world.
Among the examples cited by study co-author Michael Renner are the ongoing wars in Sierra Leone and Angola that are financed by immense diamond wealth in those countries, Colombian guerillas who finance their efforts by extorting oil companies, opium profits that (until recently) kept the civil war in Afghanistan going, and the role that profits from coltan have played in funding the ongoing conflict in the |Congo|.
Renner concludes that there are “numerous places in the developing world where abundant natural resources help fuel conflicts.”
NewScientist.Com quoted British economist David Ken as saying that, “We tend to regard conflict as simply a breakdown in a particular system, rather than as the emergence of another, alternative system of profit and power,” but that wars in Sierra Leone and elsewhere are kept going in large measure out of profit-oriented motives or what Ken calls a “conflict economy.”
Source:
“Resource wars” ignite around the world. Fred Pearce, NewScientist.Com, January 10, 2002.