The most prosperous countries in the world today are not those with the most abundant supplies of minerals or energy, but those with the most skilled and educated populations living and working in free, accountable and transparent democracies. The problem with the myth of the naturally rich country is that it also gives rise to its opposite and contradictory myth, as adumbrated recently in a deeply misguided editorial in the Times of London. This holds that an abundance of natural resources in Africa has been the cause not of wealth, but of conflict, coup and deprivation. That as an inducement to corruption, Africa's great mineral endowment had been a curse, rather than a blessing, for the vast majority of its people. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is simplistic nonsense.
Natural resources are morally neutral.
Africa provides telling examples of both. An orderly mining regime, operating within a transparent and predictable legislative and fiscal framework, can be a major source of prosperity for governments and people. You will, I hope, forgive me dwelling on this issue and in such stark terms. But it is one that has bedevilled Africa for generations and that has gained even greater relevance in recent years as some of those countries most liberally endowed with Nature's gifts have been reduced to utter penury by mismanagement of those resources and by greedy warlords contesting the ever-diminishing spoils. Today, in an effort to resolve this problem, a concerned world is trying to break the link between the guns and the gold which warlords receive from their exploitation of mineral wealth.