When we talk about theft in international trade, we usually mean piracy, smuggling, or copyright infringement. Professor Leif Wenar, of King’s College London, thinks that we might be missing the forest for the trees. Illegal transactions across borders are going on every day on an enourmous scale. Consumers cannot help buying stolen goods when they buy gasoline and magazines, clothing and cosmetics, cell phones and laptops, perfume and jewelry. Worse, the money consumers spend at the mall and the filling station ends up in the hands of some of the most brutal rebels and repressive regimes in the world.
Wenar set out a powerful case in a recent paper in Philosophy & Public Affairs to show that corporations and countries that buy natural resources from bad actors in developing countries are violating the property rights of the people of those countries. If this claim is justified, then it is urgent to find ways to stop these corporations and countries from sending us these stolen goods.
Leif Wenar spoke to Public Ethics Radio about the intersection of property rights and natural resources, and discussed his ideas for stopping the theft.
Leif Wenar is Chair of Ethics, and Director of the Centre for Medical Law and Ethics, School of Law, King’s College London. His website is www.cleantrade.org.
Click here to download (34:55, 24 mb, mp3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript.
Resources
Leif Wenar sets out the full argument discussed in the episode in his essay, “Property Rights and the Resource Curse.” There are several versions of the paper, including one published in Philosophy & Public Affairs. Other versions are available on www.cleantrade.org.
I make a number of empirical claims in the intro to the episode. On the price of coltan, and the recent history of cassiterite, see David Barouski, “‘Blood Minerals’ in the Kivu Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Some of the statistics come from the International Rescue Committee. This includes the rape statistics (2,200 in June 2008) and the mortality statistics (up to 5.4 million).
The child soldier examples come from the February 2008 report to the UN Security Council by the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The value of the cassiterite trade in eastern DRC was estimated by Global Witness in its 2005 report, “Under-Mining Peace: Tin: The Explosive Trade in Cassiterite in Eastern DRC.”
The book mentioned by Christian in his opening question is Moises Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.
The movie Blood Diamond.
The organization Freedom House publishes what Christian and Leif refer to as the Freedom House scales or index, more formally known as the Freedom in the World Survey. The survey methodology is described here.
A ranking of seven in political liberties is described thus: “For countries and territories with a rating of 7, political rights are absent or virtually nonexistent as a result of the extremely oppressive nature of the regime or severe oppression in combination with civil war. States and territories in this group may also be marked by extreme violence or warlord rule that dominates political power in the absence of an authoritative, functioning central government.”
For civil liberties: “States and territories with a rating of 7 have virtually no freedom. An overwhelming and justified fear of repression characterizes these societies.”
More info on the Kimberly Process, the conflict-diamond process, is available on www.kimberleyprocess.com.
And finally, those two websites that Leif mentions in his conclusion are www.cleantrade.org and www.globalwitness.org.
