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Kate Heartfield is the Citizen’s deputy editorial pages editor.
The Canadian-owned Kumtor gold mine accounted for 12 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP in 2011. Canadians agonize over the bureaucratic changes at CIDA, about how best to go about ending poverty, and meanwhile a Canadian company that isn’t even a household name — Centerra Gold — is responsible for a big chunk of a developing country’s economy.
And as the recent protests and roadblock showed, as the mine goes, so goes Kyrgyzstan’s national politics. If Canada is going to make a notable difference in global development and security over the next few decades, it’s going to be in places like the Kumtor mine.
The UN’s “high level panel of eminent persons” recently reported on what the world’s development goals should be after 2015. How do we maintain or even accelerate the unprecedented reduction in global poverty that has marked the beginning of this century? Globally, the extreme-poverty rate has been cut in half over the last 20 years; that amounts to nearly a billion people pulled out of dire need. Another billion, though, are still extremely poor.
As the Economist pointed out recently, those two decades have taught us valuable lessons about how to reduce poverty. Basic social safety nets, infrastructure and governance are one part of the puzzle; liberalizing trade and investment is another.