Resources

Abstract

An analysis of relations between North and South shows the former to hold all, or almost all, the advantages, which leads us to the crucial question: whether the North needs the South at all? Many appraisals of North-South relations tend to Emphasise the power of the North, in the sense of its control of the global economy, and the weakness of the South, its debts and poverty, while at the same time it is assumed, and has sometimes become part of the conventional wisdom, that at least the South possesses massive resources which the North needs and that this fact acts as some kind of counterweight which gives to the South a degree of leverage upon the more advanced technologies of the North. However, an examination of resources must throw doubt even on this assumption. The activities of the ‘greens’ world-wide, the representations of the various aid lobbies or the immense amount of publicity that preceded the Rio Earth Summit, often in the form of comparing and contrasting the wealth of the North with the poverty of the South, have between them brought awareness of the huge problems that divide North and South.