Fermo, Alexia Vanery S.

The article entitled “Forget 'developing' poor countries, it's time to 'de-develop' rich

countries” was written in September 2015, after the United Nations renegotiated the new

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in which its main objective is to eradicate poverty by

the year 2030. The author, Jason Hickel argues that we need to stop thinking of growth as the

answer to eradicating poverty, but instead try to encourage richer countries to tone down their

excesses. He explains that growth despite of being always the main objective of the development

for the past 70 years, did not work because we’ve already grown too much to the point of
“blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed” so it should not be in our options

anymore in terms of development. What we need to do, according to him is to shift some of the

yields of growth from the richer segments of the population to the poorer ones to even things out

a bit.

An economist Peter Edward proposed that- what if instead of pushing poorer countries to

“catch up” with rich ones, why don’t the rich countries “catch down” instead, in order to have

more appropriate levels of development. The idea of “de-developing” to the rich countries might

prove to be a strong rallying cry in the global south, but it will be tricky to sell to westerners

even if it is the hard truth that our ecological overshoot is due almost entirely to over-

consumption of them. They think of the word “de-develop” that is synonymous to the terms-  de-

growth and zero growth as a negative thing; as they feel like it will stop them from learning,

improving, and growing as a nation but on the contrary, “de-develop” is technically accurate

term but off-putting for anyone who’s not already on board. “De-develop” is in fact perfectly

name, compatible with high levels of human development wherein it is entirely possible for the

developed and developing countries to shrink the resource consumption while increasing things

that really matter such as human happiness, well-being, education, health and longevity.

Everyone lives in one planet. We breathe the same air, see the same sun rise from east and
set in the west. However, even with these simple yet essential things, resources are not equally

distributed in different countries. Thus, there are those who belong to the developed nations

while there are others that belong to developing countries. With this unequal distribution, I

believe that it is significant to us, a developing country to start calling on rich countries to justify

their excessive consumptions. In this article, this part ”In the US, life expectancy is 79 years and

GDP per capita is $53,000. But many countries have achieved similar life expectancy with a

mere fraction of this income. Cuba has a comparable life expectancy to the US and one of the

highest literacy rates in the world with GDP per capita of only $6,000 and consumption of only
1.9 hectares – right at the threshold of ecological sustainability. Similar claims can be made of

Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Tunisia.” shows that some of the excess income and

consumption we see in the rich world yields improvements in quality of life but it has nothing to

do with their GDP because even countries that have only fraction of it, can achieve it as well. I

think that it’s about time to put an end to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is a monetary

measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a period of time as a

measurement of human progress and development. As a part of the developing country, we need

to reorient ourselves toward a positive future, to a truer form of progress wherein we can

increase the life expectancies and happiness indicators without anchoring it to our Gross

Domestic Product because there are alternative ways to improve our lives while reducing

consumption and with this kind of mindset, who knows? Maybe in the year 2030, the Sustainable

Development Goals (SDGs) which is to eradicate poverty will be achieved. So let’s forget

'developing' poor countries, because it is indeed the time for us to 'de-develop' rich countries!