cover image It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources

It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources

James Ridgeway. Duke University Press, $22.95 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-8223-3374-6

Purportedly an alarming account of the ""commoditization of natural resources and of life itself,"" this volume is actually something tamer--a comprehensive guide to the world's major commodities, from diamonds and human beings to the skies and oceans. Ridgeway, a staff writer for the Village Voice, professes horror that a small number of corporations would ever seek to form cartels and exploit the fundamental necessities of life (even though he notes in his introduction and elsewhere that this has always been the case) and observes that things are getting worse. Maybe. It is disturbing to read that, after World War I, America and Britain created a joint venture known as the Iraq Petroleum Company and that ""with modernized industry Iraq could produce quantities of oil sufficient to rival Saudi Arabia."" Still, Ridgeway doesn't balance his accounts of cartels and exploitation with an examination of the economic forces that drive commoditization, the advantages of economic development for developing countries or the process of economic evolution. Worse, Ridgeway discusses only problems, not solutions. The book is organized commodity by commodity. Ridgeway gives a brief, and sometimes fascinating, description of the usefulness and history of each substance, its exploitation by the few and its inevitable depletion. But he stops short of suggesting any wise or fair methods of allocating resources, and this omission seems to suggest that corrupt markets are inevitable. Perhaps Ridgeway's largest failing is his tacit suggestion that commoditization is necessarily evil. Things have an economic as well as a spiritual existence, and the recognition of their market value is a useful, and necessary, first step in determining their true price.