Ignacy Sachs was born in 1927 in Warsaw, into a Jewish family forced to flee Poland invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to take refuge first in France, then, in 1941, in Brazil. After his baccalaureate, passed at the French high school in Sao Paulo, he began studying economics in this country before returning, in 1954, to Poland, then at the beginning of de-Stalinization. His leftist sympathies gave him access to the academic world, before an assignment in India added the opportunity to prepare a doctorate at the highly reputed Delhi School of Economics. He notably meets Amartya Sen and Gunnar Myrdal there.
These two stays will form the basis of an original thought, which extends a field already explored, in Argentina, by Raul Prebisch, by Albert Hirschman, in the United States, and by Hans Singer, in the United Kingdom, in works largely founded on the study of dependence and unequal exchanges between developed and developing economies.
Sachs draws from his experiences in the field his own approach, which favors development that avoids dependence and mimicry vis-à-vis developed economies, to rely on endogenous dynamics, South-South cooperation and control of technologies. and resources by each country concerned.
New approach
The violent anti-Semitic purges of the spring of 1968 in Poland forced him, with his family, into a new exile, which quite naturally led him to France. Fernand Braudel welcomed him there to the sixth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), which in 1975 became the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), a favorable setting for the continuation of his work. His international reputation and his network of contacts have earned him invitations to major conferences. That of Tokyo, in 1970, on the environment, following the mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay, will impose this question at the heart of its reflection on development. It was also the subject of the UN conference in Stockholm in 1972, the year in which the Meadows report on the limits of growth was published, commissioned by the Club of Rome, which sparked lively debate.
The concept of “ecodevelopment” presided over the creation by Ignacy Sachs, the following year, within the EPHE, of a laboratory, the International Center for Research on the Environment and Development (Cired), giving the opportunity for researchers and doctoral students to invest in a theme that has not yet been studied very much. The seminar he leads at the EPHE is always full, training generations of students in this new approach, which will become, in the late 1980s, sustainable development.
Challenging the Malthusian logic of Club of Rome musings and digressions on “zero growth,” Sachs sees no other option for development than growth. But this cannot be a replica of the “perverse growth” model pursued by developed economies, a model defined by the rate of growth of gross national product and growth through inequality, supported by demand for non-essential goods.
Scientist rooted in the concrete
In contrast to “abusive economism that does not hesitate to destroy nature in the name of immediate economic gain”, its approach is quasi-philosophical: Third World countries must seek “original civilizational projects”. They must consist, for each country, of “endogenous development, counting on its own forces, egalitarian, centered on the satisfaction of material and immaterial fundamental needs, in harmony with nature, and subordinated to the primordial objective of self-fulfilment. of human personality in conviviality”.
If this goal may seem, today even more than then, utopian, Sachs did not succumb to the ease of begging the question. On the contrary, he used his experience in the field to propose solutions, in particular technical ones, adapted to local conditions, sometimes thanks to the rehabilitation of indigenous knowledge. Intervening on development projects in the Amazon, he advocates the recovery of biomass. The studies entrusted, thanks to the contracts he wins, to Cired, document concretely, in all areas (ecology, energy, food) the issues, the possibilities and the risks. And if he recommends planning to integrate all the variables of the development equation, it is to organize the debate and choose the objectives.
A scientist rooted in the concrete without ever losing sight of the goal to be achieved, Ignacy Sachs was first of all an early founder of sustainable development, which he hoped to see impose itself thanks to UN multilateralism. He will also have been a precursor of ecological thought, while warning against its excesses, which he had well foreseen. Like those of an “excessive environmentalism erecting the conservation of nature as an absolute principle, to the point of sacrificing the interests of humanity” or of a logic of decrease, unacceptable “as long as there are poor people and inequalities gaping socials”.