Paul Collier

Paul Collier is a prolific academic and writer on development, conflict and aid on the world's poorest nations. In particular he has promoted the potential benefits of extractive industries for low income nations, and how to avoid the 'resource curse'. He is also a sceptic of organic farming and is pro genetically modified foods.

He is currently a professor of Economics, Director for the Centre for the Study of African Economies at at Oxford University. He was previously Director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank from 1998-2003.

According to Oxford University in 2010:

He is also a Professeur invité at CERDI, Université d’Auverge, and at Paris 1. In 2008 Paul was awarded a CBE ‘for services to scholarship and development’...Paul is currently Advisor to the Strategy and Policy Department of the International Monetary Fund, advisor to the Africa Region of the World Bank; and he has advised the British Government on its recent White Paper on economic development policy. He has been writing a monthly column for the Independent, and also writes for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Privatisation and Resource extraction

His first book 'The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It' was acclaimed by Jeffry Sachs, the development economist famed for developing 'economic shock therapy'- a technique for economic growth involving mass privatisation and liberalisation

His Second book “The Plundered Planet: Why We Must — and How We Can — Manage Nature for Global Prosperity” claims to be a pragmatic and practical look at how natural resources (particularly minerals for extractive industries) can be utilised to promote development and prosperity instead of corruption and 'plundering'. He pits two binary extremes against each other and presents his ideas as a third way between the 'Ostriches' who deny climate change, resource scarcity and social problems, and the 'Environmental Romantics', for example anti-genetically modified organisms campaigns, and 'back to the land' proponents.

Anti Organic Farming

In his 2008 essay 'The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis', Collier makes a hard hitting critique of 'romantic' proponents of traditional farming methods. He claims:

The first giant that must be slain is the middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture...The peasant life forces millions of ordinary people into the role of entrepreneur, a role for which most are ill suited. In successful economies, entrepreneurship is a minority pursuit; most people opt for wage employment so that others can have the worry and grind of running a business. And reluctant peasants are right: their mode of production is ill suited to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful. In modern agriculture, technology is fast-evolving, investment is lumpy, the private provision of transportation infrastructure is necessary to counter the lack of its public provision, consumer food fashions are fast-changing and best met by integrated marketing chains, and regulatory standards are rising toward the holy grail of the traceability of produce back to its source. Far from being the answer to global poverty, organic self-sufficiency is a luxury lifestyle. It is appropriate for burnt-out investment bankers, not for hungry families.