4 - The Social Consequences of Diamond Dependency

Summary

Show us a country that ignores the rural sector and we will show you a country with a high poverty quotient. Show us a country with a high poverty quotient and we will show you a country packed with implosive material.

We thank the Almighty God for granting us the mineral resources that the BDP government has prudently managed and enabled us to transform our fortunes.

Diamond wealth and fast growth, in an undiversified economy where agriculture was withering and manufacturing never growing, produced serious and extensive social consequences. Poverty and inequalities were the worst of them, from which ‘chains of inequality-disadvantage’ extended through unemployment, hunger, child mortality, crime and punishment, and poor human development generally. On recent UNDP and World Bank data for 1993–2003, 23 per cent of people lived on less than a dollar a day, and some 50 per cent got less than two dollars. The probability at birth of not surviving to age 40, 2000–05, affected 62 per cent of the cohort; adult illiteracy remained at 21 per cent in 2003, and the numbers of people experiencing chronic food insufficiency was approaching 24 per cent in 2001.