The central issue that they must come to grips with is that neither extreme affluence nor extreme poverty —wherever they exist, whether in the North or the South — are sustainable. In fact, these extremes are highly effective destroyers, not only of societies but also of nature. Their demands inexorably concatenate through the economy into the natural resource base, producing tremendous pressure on the earth’s biosphere. The rich tend to overutilise non-renewable resources and generate large quantities of waste and pollution. They also appropriate the best agricultural lands and transform these into other uses, creating many downstream ecological hazards. The poor, on the other hand, often have to meet the necessities of survival by undermining their base of renewable resources – the soils, forests and waters – and can end up by destroying them.

We need to go beyond the current, unnecessarily polarised debate between the North and the South: both population growth and runaway consumption pose unacceptable threats to planetary survival. Each leads to impoverishment and environmental destruction. Eradication of poverty and elimination of waste are as much ecological imperatives — matters of self-interest, and possibly of survival, for everyone, rich or poor – as they are moral or ethical ones. Unless the pressure on our natural resources is urgently reduced, the very basis of our economies and social fabric will be irreversibly lost, a disaster from which no one will be able to escape.

Sustainable development means that first — the basic needs of every human being must be met; and, second — that the natural resource base must be regenerated and conserved. In a developing country, as in any other, a job is the most basic need of all, a means to generate income with which to meet the other basic needs. The third world needs to create some 70 million jobs each year if it is to accommodate the needs of all the new entrants into the job market plus the backlog of unemployed people within a reasonable time frame of, say, fifteen years.

The current patterns of industrialisation manifestly have not been able to create these numbers of jobs – and manifestly cannot, with the capital and human resources available. The answer to job creation for sustainable development clearly lies elsewhere.

A better mix of large, small, mini and micro industries is now needed. Given the continued failure of policies to address the needs of the small, mini and micro sectors, a proper balance will require greater encouragement and incentives to such industries. But without improved productivity and better management and marketing systems, they can never lead to the quantum shifts in lifestyle that people everywhere now desire. For this, the large-scale success of sustainable livelihoods will depend on our ability to design sustainable enterprises, which in turn need sustainable technologies, sustainable economies and sustainable institutions of governance.

These criteria imply that the strategies of development must now turn many earlier paradigms upside down: technologies must be economically viable, institutions must be decentralised, and the environment’s capacity to supply resources must be conserved. To achieve these attributes, we will need whole sets of new concepts: participation, networks, appropriate technologies, the diseconomies of scale, environmental and social appraisal of projects, rapid resource surveys, corporate research and development, and non-governmental action.