Blood Barrels

Hello, everyone~!

You already know that I now have part-time jobs and one of them is to work as an assistant at the school for the people who wish to be translators.

When I work there, teachers always choose materials that they use for each class. Materials are videos, cassettes, and articles from magazines. So, there's a lot of magazines written in English. Foreign Affairs, TIME, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and so on. It's interesting for me just to see the covers of them. And sometimes, I get chances to turn pages a little bit.

This week, one of the materials that the teacher I've assisted use was the article from the magazine "Foreign Affairs". The article was "Blood Barrels -Why Oil Wealth Fuels Conflict-" by Michel L. Ross from the University of California, Los Angeles. After making photocopies, I had a little time to read it. (If you jump to the link above, you can't read the whole article there, but you can read the summary.)

Basically, what's written was that how the oil-rich countries have struggled to manage revenues from oil and governments that control them, and what we should do to solve the problem. According to the article, so-called "oil-rich countries" such as Kazakhstan and Nigeria have spent their revenues from oil on building new capital cities, and failed to provide running water to many villages who need it.

At the same time, we also need to think about the way we live on a daily basis because the way we live is the reason why they produce oil aggressively. The author also said that we should solve this problem as we've done for the problem of blood diamonds. He suggested that oil-rich countries' governments are required to be transparent, and the rest of us also think about each of our lifestyle that depends on oil more than you think.

After reading it, I wondered which would be happier if a country doesn't have any resource such as oil, or a country do have a lot of resources. I thought of the same thing when I watched the movie "Blood Diamond". Though we are often likely to think that the haves are happier and the key to prosperity, it's not always true. The haves and the have-nots are actually struggling in different ways.

Alright, that's for today!
See you soon. ^^