Environmental degradation and subversion of health.

When the concept of 'maldevelopment' was launched in the context of the 1975 Dag Hammarskjold Project on Development and International Cooperation, it was primarily intended to characterize the over-supply and over-consumption of inessential and unnecessary goods and services in the industrialized countries and in their small annexes in the Third World. In this contribution, Mira Shiva shows how 'maldevelopment' is expanding in the Third World together with the increase in abject poverty. This trend can be described as one of irrational excess on the one hand and of extreme deprivation on the other. What large segments of the population are deprived of are, as Mira Shiva emphasizes, essentials like food, clean water and air, health care, and safe living and working conditions. The excess, on the hand, 'consists of the bombarding of our beings, our lives, and our environment with hazardous gases, chemicals and biological contamination, i.e., irrational and inessential toxification'. In her contribution, Mira Shiva also provides a series of other striking examples of how Third World societies are flooded with inessentials in the midst of an increasing scarcity of essentials. She ends her thought-provoking article with a section devoted to the politics of population policies, an area where the North for more than 30 years has been trying to solve problems of extreme deprivation of essentials with an ever-increasing number of hazardous and irrational technological fixes. Dr. Mira Shiva is one of India's best-known health activists and the author of many papers and articles on health, environment, and women's issues.