Overcoming the Paradox of Plenty

Abstract

The ‘resource curse’, a term coined by Richard Auty in 1993, refers to the paradox that the abundance of natural resources tends to have adverse effects in a country’s economic, social and political well-being (Ross, 2015). This correlation has also led many to refer to this phenomenon as the ‘paradox of plenty’. When a country depends exclusively on the extraction of non-renewable resources it faces a wide range of risks that can be extremely difficult to manage, since they are created by powerful external factors. And Venezuela, a nation that has mainly depended on oil and mineral extraction since the 1920s, has not been the exception. The astronomical rise in the prices of various metals over the past two decades has put great pressures on resource-rich countries all over the world, especially in the global south. In recent years, and pushed by the drop of oil prices, the Venezuelan government decided to shift its attention from the oil fields of the country to the tropical forests of the Venezuelan Guayana, where large deposits of iron, bauxite, gold, diamonds, coltan, and many other rare minerals can be found.

But the ongoing economic crisis and the subsequent lack of opportunities throughout the country, have also promoted the escalation of illegal small-scale gold mining operations in this part of the Amazonia. Thousands of people, especially in neglected and peripheral areas, have found a way to survive the crisis by working in the gold mines. However, this dependency on resource extraction is having far-reaching consequences that will be felt by many generations to come, from an environmental, social and economic point of view. And from a larger perspective, the idea of maintaining a model based on the exploitation of non-renewable resources hinders the possibility of a sustainable future for the region. But is there a way out of the resource curse? What kind of
regional and local development should be promoted to overcome this dependency, and for whom? These are difficult questions that nevertheless must be addressed, especially in the Amazonian context. Therefore, this work seeks to explore the spatial dimension of this problem in the Venezuelan Guayana, to understand if the restructuring of the territory can create the conditions for the generation of alternative economies from the bottom-up and reduce the current dependence of the region on resource extraction.