The Road to Hell by Michael Maren Page B

development projects would try to cook up projects that wouldn’t fail.
    Although nothing actually changed in the field, in the day-to-day operation of development projects, everyone now spoke about sustainable development. Every proposal to get money from the UN or U.S. government employed the term or even contained an entire section devoted to it. In Somalia, even the lower level employees on projects knew that sustainable development was somehow a good thing. If you used the term, it sounded as if you knew what you were talking about.
    The beauty of the term “sustainable development” was that it could be manipulated for any purpose.
    At the 1992 Rio conference on the environment, sustainable development was about ecology. Vice President Al Gore defined sustainable development as “economic progress without environmental destruction,” adding: “That’s what sustainable development is all about.” (In the Third World, by contrast, there’s been no economic progress and plenty of environmental destruction.)
    But by the 1994 Cairo conference on population, it meant birth control. Leading up to that meeting, Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and secretary general of the Cairo conference, announced: “If we had paid more attention to empowering women thirty years ago, we might not have to battle so hard for sustainable development today.” Her organization had just released a document declaring that fertility control was the key to sustainable development.
    â€œThis year, we must also do more to support democratic renewal and human rights and sustainable development all around the world,” President Clinton said in his 1994 State of the Union Address. He didn’t elaborate. Addressing Parliament in November 1993, Queen Elizabeth II said, “My government will maintain a substantial aid program to promote sustainable development and good government.” She also chose not to elaborate.
    In June 1993, Al Gore announced the formation of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The council, he said, “can focus attention on issues of common interest. It can serve as a forum for raising ideas and plans. It can help resolve issues that arise as nations proceed intheir sustainable development agendas. It can monitor progress. It can help shift the multilateral financial institutions and bilateral assistance efforts toward a sustainable development agenda. It can help revitalize the UN system to ensure that sustainable development is a central theme in each organization. Indeed, this commission, through its focus on sustainable development, can enhance UN efforts to maintain peace, stability, and prosperity in this post-Cold War world.”
    And it wasn’t just heads of state who took up the sustainable development battle cry:
    A paper industry journal noted, “Pragmatic environmentalists have also shown that industry, including paper, will be the major force for sustainable development in which the world’s economic and environmental ambitions can best be met.”
    The 1991 annual report of the U.S. Army stated, “The Army possesses valuable knowledge about nation assistance, including expertise relating to health care, infrastructure rehabilitation, management and environmentally sustainable development.”
    The International Fertilizer Association at its 1993 conference pledged, “IFA will continue to communicate the importance of mineral fertilizers for a sustainable development of world agriculture.”
    This terminology emerged in the years after I entered the Peace Corps during the Carter administration, when the buzz was all about “meeting basic human needs.” We were sent into villages at the grass-roots level. We were expected to live like the people in the villages; we were discouraged from buying vehicles for ourselves. When I went into the bush it was