The ethics of Sustainability Are as Important to Finance and Economies as to the Environment

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

Only the bad stuff makes news and the end of July was no exception with three different environmental reports that financial institutions, businesses and politicians should take heed of.

Yet somehow, it all seems to carry on regardless. In the aftermath of the most catastrophic economic situation since the 1930s, is still no sign of contrition from those widely regarded to be most culpable.

They are the financial institutions that speculated wildly on continued growth when bundling dodgy property loans (given to people who had little prospect of repaying them) into obscure financial packages - known as mortgage backed derivatives - that not even some bankers and economists understood.

Is this writer the only person on the planet who can see a similarity to pyramid selling?

Legislation to tighten control and regulation of banks and other financial institutions in the USA, UK and Europe, according to economic experts like Prof Raghuram Rajoram, of Chicago University, and former member of the UK's Monetary Policy Committee, Dr Sushil Wadhwani, are toothless while the emphasis is still on a recovery based on growth.

Yet it's feared that the strict austerity measures introduced in the UK, US and Europe are endangering economic recovery and while it may be necessary to cut the massive government debts that propping up the banks has caused it should be done more gradually. Some would go further.

Dr Wadhwani believes what's needed is a more sustainable - and differently structured - economic model. Despit that, he says, policy makers and financial regulators are making the same policy mistakes and using the same tools as they did in previous recessions and has said: "there's not enough contrition being shown. ... Banks haven't absorbed the appropriate lessons of the mistakes they made, in fact they're not even willing to admit that mistakes were made."

There's that word sustainable again,. It's familiar in the spheres of environment, agriculture and the need to grow more food. It should be familiar in the financial and political worlds also.

What, however, have financial investors and Funds done? They've turned their attention to other sources of investment in the form of speculation on basic commodities like grain, artificially pushing up prices of basic foods beyond the means of the poorest on the planet.

Any commodity in short supply is likely of course to be a goot investment viewed from their small and insular world - buy up scarce stocks or options in future trading and the price will rise giving more profit for the investor.

There is evidently no room in the world of money for ethics.

It's instructive to put the reports mentioned earlier into this context. Firstly a report on climate change revealed 2010 has been the warmest year on record.

Then came a report that global warming might be the cause of micro-organisms dying out in the world's oceans. Phytoplankton have been disappearing at a rate of 1% per year since the mid-20th Century. They are of crucial importance to the marine food chain and they also draw down carbon dioxide while producing approximately half the oxyfgen we breathe.

Finally the Financial Times, London, revealed the leaked contents of a report by the World Bank into investors from rich nations buying up African farmland. It's due in August and expected to conclude that foreign investors without the slightest agricultural expertise are threatening local resources by buying up farmland in places like Africa in order to gain on commodity prices.

Concern has already been voiced by anti poverty campaigners about the effect specilative land buying can have on the poorest local producers by pushing them out, while investing next to bnothing in the agricultural techniques that will be needed to meet the huge growth in food production to feed a growing world population.

It may be naïve but wouldn't it actually benefit investors to put their resources into those techniques - like the new generation of low-chem agricultural products, including biopesticides, biofungicides and yield enhancers - into providing training access for small producers and into developing infrastructure to get produce to markets and so ensure a sustainable return on their investment?

Or is it all about short term gain and selfishness for a minority of super-powerful people with no real concept of living on the same, shared planet, in the same, rapidly-deteriorating environment, breathing the same globally warmed air?

It is more than chance that running the world on a continuous economic growth model in a largely unregulated market coincides with accelerated destruction of rain forests, soil fertility, global warming and a host of now annual extreme weather events, like current monsoon in Pakistan.

Sustainable economic models are plainly as important to people's survival as they are to the planet's and it's a lesson of history that financial institutions, regulators, politicians and powerful multinational businesses all need to learn - fast.