Natural Resources play a vital role in the development of the human civilisation. Natural Resources served as a source of livelihoods’ sustenance for the Natural Resource Dependent Communities (NRDC), since ages. The NRDC are indigenous in nature, their interface with nature and ecology helped flourish their communities. The larger sections of the NRDC were concentrated in the so-called developing nations where higher scales of poverty, rapid population growth, lack of nutrition and poor living standards. In addition, the modernised societies labelled the NRDC as traditional communities who are vulnerable to all levels of marginalisation, hence they have been targets (subjects) of the socio-development projects such as poverty reduction, improvising nutrition levels and enhancing economic standards. Most of the developing nations got independence in the 20th century. These nations envisioned for a modern development, which will enable them to move forward in the ladder, to achieve the power status of developed countries. They perceived that science and technologies are the gears for the modern development, particularly Africa, Asia and Latin America. For doing so, these developing nations liberalise and open their natural resources, labour, and markets to foreign investments and corporations in order to maximise economic  growth. These restructuring developments were backed up and facilitated with International Financial Aids and liberal trade agreements. The World Bank (WB) is one of the International Lending Institutions, financing developing nations for economic development. The WB facilitates the nation’s developments with severe conditionalities, packaged as Structural
Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) which will boost the nation’s economies by removing State controls and promoting market competition. Thus, WB, the non-state actor holds the thumb rule, the power of decision-making and the borrower developing nations dance to the WB’s tune. However, there are proven economies went economically unstable due to the WB’s SAPs and finally surrender nations to the WB’s conditionalities, particularly developing nation and underdeveloped nations fall easy prey for the SAP WB’s debt trap.

Read the full report here: Indian Marine Fisheries- Report by Jones

This report was written under the Smitu Kothari Fellowship program, 2020.