Fair is Fair

Underdeveloped countries are easy prey for big business from the world's leading economies. Desperate for survival, poor countries are often willing to part with valuable resources in one-sided deals and under disadvantageous conditions. The environment is usually a casualty of the exploitation the so-called Third World is invariably subject to. Still, ecological awareness has begun to turn the tide somewhat. The recent case of El Salvador's gold mining project is a case in point. After being on the verge of granting permits for it to a Canadian company, the government stepped back, given the uproar at the damage the mining would have caused. Now, the company is suing the Salvadoran government for damages, one of several cases in which foreign companies have successfully claimed that they were led on to invest substantial amounts of money in projects that the governments backed away from at the last minute.

The lesson to be learned here is that the government should study its options carefully, weighing all the elements, most notably, the environmental impact as well as the economic conditions, before committing itself to such ventures. After all, there is something inherently unfair in allowing someone to spend time, effort and money in a business proposition, and then terminating it for reasons that would have been apparent if the proper analysis had been done from the beginning. The fact that these multinational companies are no babes in the woods doesn't mean that they should be treated unfairly.

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